Measurement of ground-to-building frequency response functions for assessment of human exposure to vibration from railway vibration

The University of Salford has derived exposure-response relationships for vibration caused by railway construction and operation in residential environments. The exposure assessment methodology for almost 1000 case studies has its key factor in the measurement of synchronized ground-to-building frequency response functions (FRF). The latter is obtained by averaging the spectral content of simultaneous events recorded by two sensors, one outside and one inside the residence of the participant of the survey. In this paper magnitude only methods such as H and cross spectrum methods like H1 and H2 have been considered with the aim of assessing the most suitable way to calculate the FRF for determining the human exposure. However, an assessment of the linearity of the ground-to-building transmissibility measurement is necessary; therefore a coherence average based FRF has been introduced in order to compare the methods listed above. Furthermore, results are illustrated with measured vibration data from railway operation.