Industries
Life sciences and laboratory acoustics
A laboratory is one of the few buildings where the acoustic and vibration requirements come from the equipment rather than the people. An electron microscope, a mass spectrometer or an MRI has published limits, and if the floor cannot meet them the instrument does not perform, regardless of how the space feels to work in.
That makes it an unusually tractable problem. The criteria are numbers, they are known in advance, and meeting them is a structural and layout question that is inexpensive to answer early and very expensive to answer late.
Our experience
The engineers at Bentham have worked as acoustical consultants on laboratory and research facilities across Canada: university teaching and research labs, government research facilities, defence research laboratories, nuclear testing facilities, animal research and veterinary facilities, and specialty measurement and testing labs where vibration criteria are unusually demanding.
That includes base building work as well as fit-out. One of those projects was the first purpose-built laboratory base building in Canada, on a site adjacent to a rail corridor with a subway running beneath the property’s right of way, designed so tenants could scale from early-stage research to production within the same building. Achieving laboratory vibration criteria on that site was a base building problem, resolved in the structure and the isolation strategy before any tenant was known.
The harder problems are usually internal rather than external. Several projects have put the vibration source and the sensitive equipment inside the same facility, including shaker and environmental testing halls operating alongside laboratory space, and long-duration experimental facilities where the measurement itself sets the criterion. Those are the projects where the criterion has to be established first and the building designed around it, because there is no site selection left to solve the problem.
Noise matters in these facilities for a reason it does not elsewhere. In controlled testing, including in life science laboratories, sound is a variable, and an uncontrolled one can affect the results or the performance of the equipment producing them. That makes the acoustic criteria part of the research protocol rather than part of the finishes, and it is why they are worth settling at the same time as the vibration criteria rather than later.
Bentham Acoustics is new. Its engineers are not. The projects described here were carried out by Bentham engineers over their careers, at this firm and before it.
A full list of relevant project experience is available on request.
What we work on
Confirming the criterion before the structure is designed.
Vibration limits vary by manufacturer and by model, and the final equipment selection is often made well after the structural design is fixed. Establishing a defensible design criterion early, and knowing which instruments genuinely drive it, is the single most valuable thing that happens on these projects.
Solutions that fit how the lab actually operates.
Laboratory work is protocol-driven, and the protocol does not bend to accommodate the building. A vibration control or an acoustic treatment that interferes with access, containment, cleanability or the procedure itself is not a solution, however well it performs on paper. The useful answers are the ones that let the equipment and the people work unimpeded, which usually means resolving it in the structure and the layout rather than adding something to the room later.
Where the sensitive equipment sits.
Proximity to loading docks, parking structures, mechanical rooms, elevators and rail or road corridors determines how much the structure has to do. Moving an instrument two rooms at concept stage routinely saves more than any isolation system will.
The building’s own services.
Fume hoods, air handling, chillers, compressors and vacuum pumps are the dominant noise sources in most laboratories, and they run continuously. They are also the sources most often selected on capacity and cost alone.
Containment and separation.
Sound isolation requirements in laboratory buildings frequently coincide with pressure regimes, airtight construction and cleanability, which constrains the assemblies available and rules out several of the usual answers.
The write-up space.
Most laboratory buildings include offices, meeting rooms and collaboration areas, and they get the same treatment as any workplace. Open write-up areas adjacent to running equipment are the usual point of complaint once a building is occupied.
Vibration criteria and the structure
Laboratory vibration performance is normally described using generic vibration criteria, the VC curves, which give a velocity limit across a frequency range and allow a building to be designed before the final equipment list exists. An instrument manufacturer’s own limit takes precedence where one is issued, and those limits are sometimes stricter than the VC curve the project was designed to.
The consequence is a sequencing problem rather than a technical one. Structural depth, column spacing, slab thickness and the location of sensitive space are decided early, and they are what determine the achievable criterion. Isolation tables and equipment bases help, but they cannot recover a floor that was never capable of it.
Where a building has to accommodate instruments that are not yet chosen, the useful approach is to establish zones with different criteria rather than designing the whole floor plate to the strictest one. That is a cost conversation as much as a technical one, and it belongs at concept design.
Standards and requirements in Ontario
Laboratory acoustics is criterion-driven rather than code-driven. The Ontario Building Code applies to the building, though its acoustic provisions are directed at dwelling units and do not set criteria for laboratory space.
The working references are the generic vibration criteria for vibration-sensitive equipment, ASHRAE and ANSI criteria for background sound levels in occupied spaces, and, on academic and institutional projects, the acoustic requirements in the project’s own output specification. Where a facility is being built on an existing campus or in a mixed-use building, its mechanical plant is also assessed as a stationary source under MECP publication NPC-300.