Comfort analysis of lightweight floor system

During the past 60 years, floor systems used in housing and office-buildings in the Netherlands were mostly made of concrete or other similar materials, These floor systems, which can be characterized as heavy, normally posed little problems concerning vibrations. In recent years, in light of sustainable constmction methods, there has been a trend to reduce the use of materials and thus build lighter. In addition, building-users nowadays are more critical with regard to the comfort of the building. Light-weight floor structures are often found to be susceptible to unacceptable vibrations. The vibrations are caused by dynamic actions such as persons walking or washing machines vibrating. If one of the natural frequencies of the floor system, usually the first natural frequency, is close to the frequency of these actions, problems occur. Besides the natural frequency other properties influence the perception of a lightweight floor system such as damping. This paper describes the structural parameters that influence vibration comfort. A quality measure is used to compare the measures, based on the velocity of the structure subject to vibration, which includes human sensitivity for vibration of different frequency. A detailed study will be presented on the effect of these measures and guidelines on practical application of the results are given. It will be shown that mass has no influence on the comfort of a beam.