It should be obvious that lab tools are generally more sensitive than people. But it might not be obvious just how sensitive the different tools and processes are. In this blog post we put some “order-of-magnitude” numbers on these vibration sensitivities and typical levels.

There’s an art to developing floor vibration criteria, and the complexity increases when there aren’t explicit limits given to us by tool vendors. Even when those vendor-supplied instrument criteria are available and realistic, we need to think about what those criteria mean and how aggressively we should view risks to the project. 

As acoustical and vibration consultants, we are sometimes presented with what we call “non-physical criteria.” Non-physical criteria are usually predicated on the misunderstanding that it is possible to eliminate these contaminants. 

Just how much vibration impact can traffic create? Vibrasure produced a video at a large research institution in North America to show how significant it can be in academic laboratories.

If you’re outfitting a low-vibration imaging suite or laboratory, you’ve probably had to read a few tool installation guides for off-the-shelf (as opposed to hand-built) instruments. One problem with floor vibration criteria for laboratory instruments is that—unless we helped develop the criterion—we never get to see an “error-vs-vibration” dataset.

When it comes to vibration sensitivities, most lab groups operate fairly routine research programs. But if “most” groups run “ordinary” programs, then you shouldn’t be surprised when you run into one group with an extraordinary program. This happened to me many years ago, and it completely opened my eyes to the incredible diversity in R&D.

A Vibrasure produced video on floor vibration and walker speed. It turns out that pace is by far the most-important parameter in predicting walker-generated floor vibrations. So, how fast do people really walk in buildings, anyway?