During my first semester at Duke, I enrolled in Engineering 101: Engineering Design and Communication, a class designed as an early introduction to engineering, exposing first-semester students to the engineering design process through a team-based semester-long project while simultaneously having students explore various technologies throughout the lab, such as soldering & Arduino, laser cutting, and 3D printing & CAD. My team was tasked with designing and constructing a noise safety system for the Duke Engineering Design POD, one of Duke's main engineering workspaces as well as the meeting location of the class. Our client was the lab manager of the Design POD, who was interested in obtaining a sound safety system as he had realized no such system yet existed.

Our team first conducted extensive research into sound safety and decibel levels, and discovered that any sound over 85 dB can be potentially damaging to human hearing given a sufficiently long exposure time. 8 hours at constant 85 dB conditions can cause permanent hearing impairment, and as the sound level grows, the safe exposure time rapidly plummets. At 100 dB, only 15 minutes can cause damage, and at 115 dB, even just one minute of exposure is enough to impart irreversible harm. Many common power tools operate at decibel levels in the vicinity of 100 dB, so in an engineering workshop filled with loud equipment, precaution against hearing damage is a vital safety concern.

The team brainstormed many different methods to create a sound safety system for the workspace. Given our design criteria, visible in the poster below, a handheld, battery-powered solution was determined as the best solution case, utilizing a microphone to measure sound levels, and a number of both visual and auditory outputs to inform the user of the sound status, as well as a rigid 3D printed body to protect the inner electronics. A number of iterations were made before a solution was achieved that satisfied all tested criteria, and this solution was presented to our client, as well as our advisors and professors that assisted us throughout the process, at the end of the semester for immediate use in improving sound safety in the Design POD. Below is the final poster from this presentation.