Method for developing a sound power budget for large numbers of sound sources

Data center construction is a growing industry and an expanding source of environmental noise. These structures require extensive cooling for server equipment, provided by large arrays of mechanical devices. These equipment arrays are often modeled in computer software to gain a detailed understanding of expected sound pressure levels over a landscape. However, economic incentives drive data centers to be developed rapidly, and the modeling methods may not be agile enough to capture rapid design chances and so simpler, conceptual estimation methods may be useful. This paper develops a simple estimation method for combining sound powers of multiple sound sources, analyzes its expected accuracy, and discusses how the expected accuracy may be used to derive a sound power budget for a source array.