Vibration Serviceability of a Building Floor Structure. II: Vibration Evaluation and Assessment

Abstract

People are generally very sensitive to unexpected vibrations. Very small levels of building floor movements due to activities such as walking can become annoying to occupants. Accurate prediction, evaluation, and assessment of vibrations can greatly assist engineers and architects to design cost-effective building structures without such problems. In an attempt to clarify some of the issues related to this common serviceability problem, this paper presents a study of the various parameters used for the evaluation and assessment of building vibrations. Provisions of several current standards and design guides commonly used in North America and U.K. to evaluate and assess building vibrations as related to human perception and comfort are reviewed. These provisions are then applied using the vibrations measured during a number of walking tests conducted on a large cantilevered office building floor. Based on the results of this study, it is concluded that the vibration dose value (VDV) recommended by some standards and design guides provides a consistent and reasonable method of evaluation of building floor vibrations. In addition, new relationships between VDV, peak frequency-weighted acceleration, and crest factor are established to estimate the VDV.