Vibration serviceability of pre-stressed concrete floor system under human activity

Abstract

A comprehensive research was undertaken to study the vibration serviceability of a long-span pre-stressed concrete floor system intended to be used in an indoor badminton court, using the field test and finite element method. Specifically, heel-drop was adopted to capture the natural frequencies and modal damping ratios of the floor system and the tests for jumping impact and different types of human excitations (walking, running and hopping) were performed to capture the acceleration responses. The floor system is found to have low frequency and modal damping ratio. The comparison of the experimental results with the published values from China’s design code, AISC design guide and PCI design handbook indicates that the pre-stressed concrete floor system exhibits satisfactory vibration perceptibility overall. The acceleration threshold value given in the China’s code and AISC design guide may be conservative for the pre-stressed concrete floor under hopping excitation. For determining the fundamental natural frequency analytically, fixed-pinned support condition is recommended for accounting for the effect of adjacent structures on floor stiffness. Coefficients βrp is proposed to calculate the RMS acceleration conveniently by hand.