Vibration criteria for metrology laboratories

Establishment of appropriate vibration criteria is essential when designing vibration-sensitive metrology laboratories. Boundary values that are too severe may lead to unnecessarily high construction costs, whereas limits that are too broad may result in degradation of the performance of measurement equipment. The Norwegian Metrology and Accreditation Service (Justervesenet) inaugurated a new facility early in 1997. The facility will allow measurements of mass, density, dimensional, force, volume, optical, pressure, temperature and electrical quantities. Vibration control is of concern in most of the laboratories. Vibration criteria have been defined in terms of frequency-dependent peak values. In this paper, these criteria are described and the most conservative criterion is compared with other known vibration criteria for standard laboratories and high-technology facilities. The vibration criteria considered have different formulations and cannot be compared directly. They are therefore compared with regard to three different kinds of idealized vibration excitation, that is, transient, harmonic-motion and broad-band noise. The comparison shows that the most conservative Justervesenet vibration criterion is stricter with respect to high-frequency vibrations than are the others, but it is less strict for low-frequency vibrations.