Design Guidance for Installing Vibration Sensitive Equipment in Industrial Facilities

Abstract

The need to understand floor vibrations in an industrial facility has increased in recent years as the drive for tighter manufacturing tolerances has increased. This drive has led to an increase in manufacturing equipment that is sensitive to floor vibrations. The main contribution of this thesis is the experimental verification of a method to predict the effects of nearby vibrating equipment on vibration sensitive equipment. By using this method, a designer may be able to avoid the installation of special isolation foundations for vibration sensitive equipment by either demonstrating the lack of need for the special foundation or locating the other vibration sources far enough away to allow for sufficient attenuation. To achieve this, vibration levels were measured at four sites from multiple vibration sources at each site. These measurements were used to create a model for how vibrations attenuate from a single source with distance. Measurements were also taken while multiple vibration sources were operating to quantify how vibration waves combine. The results of the measurements allowed for the creation of a vibration attenuation model that conservatively estimates ground vibrations, as well as a method for accounting for multiple vibration sources on a floor space. The culmination of this was shown to provide conservative predictions of the floor vibrations near sensitive equipment from multiple nearby vibration sources. Additionally, by closely analyzing the experimental results, the vibration waves at the frequencies under consideration, less than 100 Hz, created from equipment installed on concrete slabs on grade primarily traveled through the underlying soil and behaved accordingly.