Sound power testing for ISO certification
Introduction  Sound power is an acoustic metric that represents the total noise or acoustic power generated by a specific machine or tool. It corresponds to an intrinsic acoustic property of the equipment itself and is not influenced by the environment the equipment is operating in. Sound power values can be used to compare different machines and products in an absolute way, to do competitive benchmarking or to validate the impact of design modifications on a product’s acoustic profile. The sound power metric also forms the basis for compliance testing with respect to the ISO-based standards and legislations for product noise certification. The European directive for noise emission (2000/14/EC) for example, applies to broad range of outdoor equipment and forces manufacturers to conduct an ISO based sound power measurements to label their equipment (noise marking) or to comply with maximum values (noise limiting). Failing to meet the standard does not only represent a competitive disadvantage, it simply prohibits manufacturers from selling their equipment on the European market.
Industries and applications concerned
Following industries are concerned with sound power testing:
- Outdoor equipment
- Hand held power tools
- Off-road vehicles
- Office equipment
- White goods
Following products are concerned with sound power testing:
The LMS Test.Xpress system guides the user through the different steps of the ISO sound power setup and covers the full process from measurement to reporting. The following step-by-step procedure is available:
The LMS Test.Xpress solution for sound power testing
The LMS Test.Xpress system consists of a measurement front-end (LMS SCADAS Mobile SCM01 or SCM05) and the LMS Test.Xpress Sound Power based on Sound Pressure software which offers a dedicated user interface with integrated MS Office reporting supporting the different ISO based measurements standards for both free-field and reverberant acoustic environments:
The whole process from the initial setup, selection of parameters down to the final ISO report is embedded in a dedicated, workflow-based user interface. Critical parameter setting are password locked to avoid errors during the actual measurement. The straightforward user interface simplifies the measurement process and guides non-expert or occasional users step-by-step towards the final ISO report. Using the Test.Xpress software, more experienced users can unlock all parameters, define extra measurement channels, change the default ISO setup and reports and process the parallel recorded time data in more detail to find the root cause for failing to meet limit values.  The LMS Test.Xpress system is based on the scalable LMS SCADAS Mobile data acquisition hardware, which can be configured to measure all microphone positions and extra channels in one single run. This dramatically reduces the total setup and measurement time, and increases the quality and consistency of the measured data. Supported standards for sound power testing The LMS Test.Xpress system supports the following Sound power standards (pressure method):
|
