Mitigating footfall-induced vibration in long-span floors

Abstract

Long-span lightweight floor systems with low damping are susceptible to serviceability problems due to human excitations. This paper discusses two remedial measures to alleviate disturbing footfall-induced vibrations observed on a real office floor of steel-concrete composite construction. One treatment involves stiffening the existing floor beams while the other utilises passive control with an innovative distributed multiple viscoelastic tuned mass damper (TMD) system. Several finite element models reflecting different remedial scenarios are analysed from which the TMD approach and the traditional stiffening technique are found to be comparably effective in reducing the vibration level. Ho..