The Government of the HKSAR Standards and Calibration Laboratory (SCL) has developed new calibration services for vibration monitoring equipment to support the construction, testing and certification industries in Hong Kong. Vibration monitoring equipment, such as vibration meters, is used to monitor the health of machines, to diagnose structural faults and to analyse building structures. A vibration meter typically consists of an accelerometer and an indicator. The accelerometer converts the force exerted on a structure caused by vibration or acceleration into electrical signals for displaying results on the indicator. With the measurement results, the impact due to vibration on the structure under test can be analysed.

Vibration monitoring equipment is calibrated by using a laser interferometer or by comparison with the Laboratory’s reference transducer for frequencies ranging from 10 Hz to 10 kHz and acceleration from 1 ms-2 to 350 ms-2. The best measurement uncertainty is 1.1%. These new calibration services were assessed by the Hong Kong Accreditation Service (HKAS) under the Hong Kong Laboratory Accreditation Scheme (HOKLAS) in January 2017, with Dr. Huang Yu Chung, Chairman of the Technical Committee for Acoustics, Ultrasound and Vibration (TCAUV) of the Asia Pacific Metrology Programme (APMP), serving as the peer reviewer. For more information about vibration related calibration services, please visit the SCL’s website at www.itc.gov.hk/scl.