Soundproofing cabin for noise reduction of fans in Kaolin AD, Vetovo

Kaolin AD is a company which mines, produces, and sells mineral resources for customers in Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. The company offers kaolin, feldspar, silica sand, limestone, dolomite, and chamotte. Kaolin was founded in 1924 and is based in Tsenovo, Bulgaria. It operates as a subsidiary of Quarzwerke GmbH 

The problem which Kaolin was facing the last couple of years was the generated by rotary circulating fan machines noise in their production facility in Vetovo city. The machines affect the working environment in a negative way creating stress and discomfort in the workers around the machine.

Many production facilities have the similar problems and have damaged a lot by non – stoppable noise pollution. This is why the measures taken on time are extremely important.

Source

The noise source in the face of rotary circulating fan creates sound levels of above 113 dB,a figure extremely inappropriate for a work environment. Kaolin as a client turned to Decibel for the design and implementation of soundproofing cabin, specially designed to meet 4 specific requirements. The cabin should be:

-       Detachable

-       With natural ventilation

-       With lighting

-       Accessible

The experience of DECIBEL and its engineers in creating and designing a soundproofing cabins was the factor which attracted Kaolin. All requirements were meet and even more.

Challenges

One of the challenges which our engineering team has faced was the small free space for constructing the cabin. The walls shouldn’t be more than 66 mm thick. The walls in the standard soundproofing cabins are 100 mm. This time the engineers should design a panel walls, which on one hand had to be extra thin, but on the other their thickness shouldn’t decrease their sound insulating properties.

Another challenge was the incoming and outcoming tube of the fan, which works as noise transmitter. Only the tube generated 95 dB noise.

Decibel Cabin

The designed solution which should control the noise of the machine was a cabin made of lightweight aluminum detachable construction which was placed on vibroinsulating pads of highest quality. The soundproofing panels used in the cabin are built of stainless steel, which was cut, bent and welded on a digital laser, an electronic abcant machine and a welding robot.

Another specific of the panels is that they are painted trough powder coating with certificate for acid and abrasion resistance. 

For covering the requirement for natural ventilation, the engineers of DECIBEL have used a highly effective silencers in combination with specially designed fan.

The challenge of soundproofing the noise transmission tube was faced through the use of viscoelastic materials coated in high – strength steel.

Result

The result: lightweight cabin with only 75 mm thicknesses of the walls which succeeded in reducing the noise from the fan from 113 dB to 82.9 dB and which was built only for the time period of 5 days.