Advanced Engineering Control Strategies Applied to Occupational Noise Management in Mining Dump Trucks

This paper addresses the implementation of cutting-edge engineering techniques to reduce the exposure to occupational noise in drivers of mining dump trucks. For this, a project has been carried out in Cerrejon, which is one of the biggest open coal mines in the world. The target goal is oriented to reduce the noise values under the TLVs according to the exposure time. Although, a guideline methodology for noise control design is established by the international standard ISO 11690, the complexity of the problem yields to the development of state of the art signal processing algorithms and the implementation of knowledge frontier measurement/simulation techniques. The results indicate that the proposed approach allows to tackle noise problems of high complexity leading to a practical solution that benefits the exposed population as noise levels are lowered below threshold limit values.