Noise, Acoustics and Vibration – Markets Served

The acoustic comfort of dwellings directly impacts occupants’ ability to relax, refresh, focus, and communicate, which has become crucial as more people are or consider working from home. Our acoustic and vibration experts provide high quality design solutions that are focused on the occupants and how they interact with the buildings.

Intertek BSS-NAV has extensive experience in solving the challenges of integrating modern amenities, such as fitness spaces, lounges, and roof terraces, which provide residential facilities with exciting new community spaces for the occupants, while addressing the acoustical concerns for neighbors. Our staff has extensive experience performing Dept. of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Noise Assessments and solving the acoustic and vibration challenges associated with transit-oriented developments. Also, we provide acoustic and vibration consulting services from master planning through post-construction and occupancy of multi-family, mixed-use and hospitality facilities. Intertek staff are also accredited professionals with knowledge of how to integrate the acoustic goals of LEED and WELL into sustainable residential projects.

Optimized acoustic environments within workplaces improve employees’ productivity, comfort, and work satisfaction. Many of these workplace projects are striving for voluntary and aspirational goals, such as LEED and WELL, that improve acoustic conditions along with achieving a more sustainable and higher performing environment. Modern workplace amenities, such as cafes, fitness spaces, and gathering spaces, present acoustic and vibration issues that require special consideration by our team to ensure that these activities complement the overall environment.

Intertek BSS-NAV’s experts understand acoustic concerns of office and commercial buildings and have provided creative, efficient, cost-effective acoustic design solutions to achieve acoustic comfort in the workplace. Our goal is to consult with clients to serve the wide variety of neurodiverse occupants providing spaces that allow each person to enjoy a space that supports their tasks and activities. Our experience ranges from corporate headquarters for global organizations to multi-tenant commercial office developments and fit-outs.

Modern hospitals and outpatient facilities often require compliance with the Facility Guidelines Institute (FGI) guidelines, which include acoustic and vibration criteria that will affect the design and construction of these projects. Another acoustical concern we have experience with is addressing the privacy of patients in accordance with the Healthcare Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), by achieving suitable sound isolation and background sound levels throughout the healthcare spaces. Likewise, healthcare organizations are incentivized to maximize their Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) survey responses, where acoustics plays an important role in a higher survey score and financial reimbursements.

Intertek BSS-NAV staff understands the unique acoustic and vibration challenges faced by healthcare, research, and science facilities. Our experience allows us to integrate with the design teams and stakeholders to ensure evidence-based objectives are obtained with efficient and cost-effective solutions to create optimal environments for staff conducting research or administering treatment. Intertek BSSNAV has the expertise and experience to assess, design and mitigate noise and vibration to and from highly sensitive equipment, such as imaging and therapeutic systems. Intertek has the experience to control the sound emissions from these facilities, which have high ventilation and cooling requirements, to comply with the applicable ordinances and regulations.

Acoustics within educational facilities is critical for the engagement and learning outcomes of the students, along with the effectiveness and wellbeing of the instructors. Instructional spaces require quiet sound levels to allow clear communication for sharing ideas, gaining knowledge, and integrating modern audio technology. Educational facilities also include spaces for music and multimedia education, which require sound isolation from adjacent spaces and noise control within these specialty spaces. Recreational facilities often include instruction, which requires a careful balance of controlling reverberation and creating intelligibility for class time or practices, but also allow the space to have sufficient liveliness to support the home team. Modern educational facilities include air-conditioning systems that need to be studied to ensure that the facility is a good neighbor to the surrounding community.

Our BSS-NAV Group has worked closely with the designers, planners, and educators to help achieve optimum acoustic conditions in their facilities to promote their various learning and teaching programs and to achieve better learning & teaching experience for the occupants and student outcomes. Our staff is familiar with classroom acoustic standards, such as ANSI S12.60, and various guidelines from ASHRAE, LEED, WELL, CHPS and others. We provide acoustic and vibration design solutions to suit the projects’ long-term and short-term space planning, as well as flexible and open plan learning programs. Our group also has extensive experience consulting with institutions to help with controlling sound emissions to the neighbors from various exterior equipment and recreational facilities.

Performing arts and critical listening spaces seek to achieve optimal acoustics to enhance shared experience for both performers and listeners. These spaces typically strive for very low levels of background sound; not only from sources within the space such as HVAC, but from sources outside the space such as activities in adjacent spaces within the building, traffic noise outside the building, or ground-borne noise and vibration from nearby transportation systems such as trains and subways. 

Our BSS-NAV Group has provided high quality design solutions for performance, rehearsal, recording, and broadcast spaces with regard to the room acoustics, sound & vibration isolation, mechanical system noise & vibration control, etc. to meet or exceed each project’s acoustic aspirations. We design venues to promote the creativity by the artists and quality of production by the technical staff for impactful artistic expressions and performances. For the critical listening spaces, we shape and specify these spaces to have a ‘flat’ response across the audible frequency range to create an optimum acoustic condition for the performers and audience. Intertek provides consulting on isolation necessary to achieve the desired quality of background noise and vibration for these facilities.

Data centers are essential in our society’s technology and computing infrastructure. The equipment within these facilities provides the technology that our businesses, institutions and governments require to function, while we as consumers rely on the streaming services, cloud computing and data storage that power our digital lives. In the process, these facilities consume a considerable amount of energy and produce significant noise to provide substantial cooling and stand-by power ensuring these facilities perform reliably.

Intertek BSS-NAV has a high level of expertise and experience in providing acoustic and vibration consulting services for data centers. We work with the clients and the design team to provide the acoustic conditions that are optimized for incorporating the latest technical solutions and sustainable designs, ideally supporting an optimized Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) for the facility. Our recommendations often focus on quiet equipment selection, optimized operating conditions, and equipment specific noise control, such as enclosures, mufflers, and barriers that achieve the regulatory requirements that the project needs to comply with to fit well into the community.

Transportation terminals require the ability to move travellers through efficiently and comfortably. Often that requires both large geometric volumes and finishes that are cleanable and durable, both conditions which can lead toward sound reflecting and reverberant spaces. With large groups of people, there is also the need for the public address system to convey messages and alerts in an intelligible manner that the occupants of these spaces can easily understand and react to; in fact, many local authorities are enforcing the speech intelligibility requirements in the codes to ensure this is handled correctly.

Intertek BSS-NAV has worked with architects and designers to create terminals and stations that provide both the acoustic comfort for the occupants and intelligibility for the public address systems that comply with modern emergency system requirements for intelligibility for announcements and addresses.

Excessive noise within industrial and manufacturing facilities may present a risk of hearing damage and other health problems. In addition, excess noise interferes with effective communication for occupants and can impede the ability to recognize warning signals, which in turn can lead to accidents. Industrial and manufacturing equipment noise and vibration can impact occupants or vibration sensitive equipment within the facility, or they may impact the surrounding community.

Our team has experience with controlling industrial and manufacturing noise and vibration. Intertek has provided continuous noise measurement services per U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) guidelines to help monitor the noise exposure and dosage to employees. Our BSS-NAV Group utilizes these studies to inform the selection of engineering controls and best available control technology (BACT) for resolving noise or vibration concerns. Furthermore, we understand the governing regulatory requirements to assist our clients with identifying how potential sound emissions from the facility equipment can be controlled to acceptable levels for the surrounding community.

Modular construction is a process where a building is constructed in a factory under controlled conditions, produced in modules that are then shipped and assembled on site. This approach to building often uses unconventional materials and assembly techniques, which require innovative solutions to noise and vibration control between modules and partitions. We collaborate with our colleagues that have direct experience with inspecting modular constructions to develop holistic solutions.

Our BSS-NAV Group understands the federal code requirements and industry’s best practices to achieve suitable sound and vibration isolation for modular constructions. We provide performance estimations or conduct iterative field testing to pinpoint the best design options to produce high performing modular buildings. We also research and develop solutions that can be safely transported.

Balancing acoustic comfort and expectations in sports facilities while separating the excitement of the activities from adjacent occupied spaces is a key to successful acoustic design for such venues. Similarly, modern fitness routines, such as high intensity workouts and cross fitness activities, often include highly amplified audio, introducing substantial challenges for noise and vibration isolation of surrounding occupants within the same facility.

Intertek BSS-NAV’s experts have experience and understanding of the unique challenges that various building structures may present to these projects and has provided design solutions for achieving acoustic and vibration isolation to protect adjacent building occupants and controlling the excessive reverberant noise build-up in the facilities.

Spaces of worship and sacred places are often the most critical listening spaces for many people, where the acoustics of a space directly affects quiet contemplation, liturgy, and musical experiences. Careful acoustic design can positively impact the experience of the faith community, enhance the worship music performance, understanding of a teaching, and the feeling the congregation leaves with after a service.

Our BSS-NAV team provides excellent service to design efforts for new or existing sacred spaces to improve the clarity of faith, beliefs, or spiritual teachings. Our services support designers toward isolating environmental noises and creating privacy between rooms within the worship facility. In the sanctuary and gathering halls, we recommend acoustic designs that support spoken word and musical expressions serving the multi-functional activities for many faiths.