Page 26 - Volume 8, Issue 1 Winter 2013

TAKING AMERICAN NATIONAL STANDARDS TO THE
INTERNATIONAL LEVEL
Michael A. Bahtiarian
Noise Control Engineering 799 Middlesex Turnpike Billerica, Massachusetts 01821
Once you have led a group of “Unlike Super Bowl winning It took about four years for the
national experts on the creation
of the first commercial standard
for the measurement of underwater noise
from ships, what do you do next? First,
you celebrate that you got the job done
and make sure everyone knows that it is
not just a “commercial standard,” but
more correctly, the first “voluntary consensus standard.”
Until the formation of Working Group 47 under the Acoustical Society of America’s (ASA) S12 committee on Noise, no one was talking about standardizing a method for the source level measurement of a ship’s underwater noise signature.
teams, standards committees
working group’s efforts to be realized with the issue of American National Standards Institute/Acoustical Society of America (ANSI/ASA) S12.64- 2009/Part 1, American National Standard, Quantities and Procedures for Description and Measurement of
are not offered paid trips to
Disney World...”
Underwater Sound from Ships- Part 1: General Requirements. This author was given an opportunity to write about the tech- nical details of the standard in the October 2009 issue of Acoustics Today. Briefly, the standard provides a description of the methodology, instrumentation, and data processing to quantify an “affected source level” measured using
Fig. 1. For reference, this diagram is taken from ANSI/ASA S12.64-2009/Part 1 and shows the hydrophone geometry for Grades A and B. The reader is referred to the October 2009 issue of Acoustics Today for further technical details. Used with permission from the Acoustical Society of America, © Copyright 2009.
American National Standards and the International Level 25