Establishment of appropriate vibration criteria is essential when designing vibration-sensitive metrology laboratories. Too severe boundary values may lead to increased construction costs, while too broad limits may result in degradation of the performance of measurement equipment. The Norwegian Metrology and Accreditation Service inaugurated a new facility early in 1997. Vibration control is of concern in most of the laboratories in the building. In this paper, vibration criteria defined for the miscellaneous laboratories are described and compared with other known vibration criteria. The vibration criteria considered have different formulations and cannot be compared directly. They are therefore compared with regard to three different kinds of idealised vibration excitation, that is, transient, harmonic motion and broad-band noise. The comparison shows that the most conservative Norwegian Metrology and Accreditation service vibration criterion is more strict with respect to high frequency vibrations than the others, but less strict for low frequency vibrations.
