Noise research could lead to better-designed motorcycles

The vast majority of noise that motorcyclists experience doesn’t emanate from the engine or other vehicles, but rather from air flow around the bike, helmet and body.

‘As a rule of thumb, if you do 70mph [113km/h], it takes about 15 minutes to hit your daily noise dose,’ project lead Michael Carley, a mechanical engineer at Bath University, told The Engineer.

‘Obviously there’s a workplace health and safety problem here, and that’s why the first people who started worrying about this were the employers of professional riders, because they were, in principle, laying themselves open to litigation for hearing damage through negligence,’ he added.

Indeed, police riders must now have annual hearing assessments; however, little research has been performed out of house for the direct benefit of consumers.

Carley’s team first performed measurements on volunteer motorcyclists who were equipped with a basic GPS device and microphone — allowing them to plot road speed against noise at each point of the audio recording. This revealed a linear scale peaking at 115dB at around 80mph.