Noise exposure of the ramp's operatorsin airport apron

The current regulation regarding noise exposure protection of workers cannot consider the peculiarities of some work environments. The study here presented concentrates on one of these peculiar site, the airport apron, where there are many difficulties in performing measurment, owing to the risks associated with the airport activities, and in selecting and evaluating each noise source. In this environment, where hard works are carried on, the dosimeter cannot be easily used and different methods must be considered and applied. Several kinds of operations and operators have been considered. A procedure is here proposed for evaluating the noise exposure of ramp’s operators starting from acoustical measurements of sound pressure levels produced by ramp equipments. Measurements have been carried out with a multichannel and multiprocessing sound analyzer placed as much as possible near the source. Simultaneously the peak level and other index are registered. A method for cleaning the experimental data during the data analyzing process is here considered to compute through the noise exposure time the daily equivalent level of exposure. Afterwards obtained LEX, 8h are compared with the limits imposed by the current regulations.