Measurement of effective noise exposure of workers wearing ear-muffs

Abstract

This paper presents the methodology and the results of binaural measurements of exposure to noise for 91 industry workers wearing ear-muffs. The results revealed that 18.7% of the workers were exposed to noise of equivalent A-weighted sound pressure levels of over 80 dB(A) and 7.7% to levels of over 85 dB(A). The measured levels were compared with those calculated with the octave-band method according to Standard No. EN 458:2004. The differences ranged from -3 dB(A) to 26.5 dB(A); their statistical distribution did not indicate any data which could suggest derating laboratory measurements. The main causes of exposure to noise higher by over 3 dB(A) than that theoretically predicted were the bad technical condition of ear-muffs (32.2% of the cases) and an incorrect way of wearing them (15.2%).