Noise reduction of pedestrian trucks for street unloading

Sammanfattning: This report is the result of a Master’s Degree Thesis done at the Royal Institute of Technology, KTH, during October 2014 to April 2015. The project was commissioned by Lidl in collaboration with Stockholms Stad and Integrated Transport Research Labs at KTH, and is a part of the Off-peak project. The Aim of the project was to help Lidl perform quieter street unloadings during off-peak hours. The unloading, today, is done with electrical pedestrian trucks and roll containers. Information was gathered about the current equipment and the current method of unloading was studied through observations. There were three problematic areas identified: the uneven ground, the hardware and the user. These were studied further on a pedestrian truck which was borrowed from Lidl for the thesis work. A market study was performed to see what solutions existed on the market. Information was also gathered on Off-peak projects in other cities and what the benefits of such projects could be. Study visits were made to Toyota-BT in Mjölby and Karnag in Täby to gather further knowledge. A meeting was held with K.Hartwall at Integrated Transport Research Lab to discuss their current solutions. The three problematic areas were discussed during a midterm meeting. Two of them were selected for future work: an add-on module to keep the fork carriage from rattling and an aid for the drivers of the trucks that shows the noise level. Many iterations of brainstorming, testing and evaluating led to the final results. The testing showed that the module that was supposed to keep the fork carriage from rattling didn’t have the desired results. The choice was then made to develop a spring solution to keep the forks from bouncing of each other. This led to the development of a leaf spring solution that is mounted on the underside of the fork carriage. The development of an aid for the drivers led to the Noise Advisor which is a sound level meter that sits on the side of the trucks mast and gives visual feedback to the driver.