Development of a Neuro Fuzzy Model for Noise Prediction in opencast Mines

The need of developing appropriate noise prediction models for finding out the accurate status of noise levels (>90 dBA) generated from various opencast mining machineries is overdue. The measured sound pressure levels (SPL) of equipments are not accurate due to instrumental error, attenuation due to geometrical aberration, atmospheric attenuation etc. Some of the popular noise prediction models e.g. VDI and ENM have been applied in mining and allied industries. Among these models, VDI2714 is simple and less complex model. In this paper, a neuro-fuzzy model is proposed to predict the machinery noise in an opencast coal mine. The proposed model is trained with VDI2714 and the model output is seen very closely to matching with VDI2714 output. The model proposed has a mean square error of 2.73%. This model takes CPU time of nearly 0.0625 sec where as it takes 0.5 sec for VDI2714 i.e. approximately twelve times faster.