Vibration Serviceability of Building Floors: Performance Evaluation of Contemporary Design Guidelines

Abstract

The drive toward innovative designs of structural systems assisted by more efficient materials has resulted in ever more slender spans and lighter weight constructions. This has also been accompanied by the growing trend of open-plan floor developments with fewer internal partitions. As a consequence, concerns are being increasingly expressed over excessive human-induced vibrations under normal in-service conditions. These floors might be considered as failing to meet the vibration serviceability criterion, even though in some cases they might satisfy the requirements of existing vibration design guidelines and tolerance limits. Thus, this paper outlines a thorough back analysis of three tested full-scale floors with finite-element modeling to evaluate the reliability of contemporary guidelines. It is demonstrated that current forms of design guidance could require significant improvements in the key aspects of walking load models, response prediction, and threshold tolerance in order to more reliably predict actual vibration response and corresponding vibration assessment.