Risk of Hearing Loss Injury Caused by Multiple Flash Bangs on a Crowd
Abstract
A flash bang is a non-lethal explosive device that delivers intensely loud bangs
and bright lights to suppress potentially dangerous targets. It is usually used in
crowd control, hostage rescue and numerous other missions. We construct a
model for assessing quantitatively the risk of hearing loss injury caused by
multiple flash bangs. The model provides a computational framework for incorporating the effects of the key factors defining the situation and for testing
various sub-models for these factors. The proposed model includes 1) uncertainty in the burst point of flash bang mortar, 2) randomness in the dispersion
of multiple submunitions after the flash bang mortar burst, 3) decay of acoustic impulse from a single submunition to an individual subject along the
ground surface, 4) the effective combined sound exposure level on an individual subject caused by multiple submunitions at various distances from the
subject, and 5) randomness in the spatial distribution of subjects in the crowd.
With the mathematical model formulated, we seek to characterize the overall
effect of flash bang mortar in the form of an effective injury area. We carry
out simulations to study the effects of uncertainty and randomness on the risk
of hearing loss injury of the crowd. The proposed framework serves as a
starting point for a comprehensive assessment of hearing loss injury risk, taking into consideration all realistic and relevant features of flash bang mortar.
It also provides a platform for testing and updating component models.
Description
The article of record as published may be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.4236/ajor.2018.84014
Rights
This publication is a work of the U.S. Government as defined in Title 17, United States Code, Section 101. Copyright protection is not available for this work in the United States.Collections
Related items
Showing items related by title, author, creator and subject.
-
Risk of Hearing Loss Caused by Multiple Acoustic Impulses in the Framework of Biovariability
Wang, Hongyun; Burgei, Wesley A.; Zhou, Hong (Scientific Research Publishing Inc., 2018-05);We consider the hearing loss injury among subjects in a crowd with a wide spectrum of individual intrinsic injury probabilities due to biovariability. For multiple acoustic impulses, the observed injury risk of a crowd vs ... -
Interpreting Dose-Response Relation for Exposure to Multiple Sound Impulses in the Framework of Immunity
Wang, Hongyun; Burgei, Wesley A.; Zhou, Hong (Scientific Research Publishing SCIRP, 2017-12-20);Hearing loss is a common military health problem and it is closely related to exposures to impulse noises from blast explosions and weapon firings. In a study based on test data of chinchillas and scaled to humans (Military ... -
Asymptotics and Well-Posedness of the Derived Distribution Density in a Study of Biovariability
Wang, Hongyun; Burgei, Wesley A.; Zhou, Hong (Scientific Research Publishing, 2018);In our recent work (Wang, Burgei, and Zhou, 2018) we studied the hearing loss injury among subjects in a crowd with a wide spectrum of heterogeneous individual injury susceptibility due to biovariability. The injury risk ...