Evaluation of timber-concrete floor performance under occupant-induced vibrations using continuous monitoring

This paper describes the design of a system to monitor floor vibrations in an office building and an analysis of several months' worth of collected data. Floors of modern office buildings are prone to occupant-induced vibrations. The contributing factors include long spans, slender and flexible designs, use of lightweight materials and low damping. As a result, resonant frequencies often fall in the range easily excited by normal footfall loading, creating potential serviceability problems due to undesirable levels of vibrations. This study investigates in-situ performance of a non-composite timber-concrete floor located in a recently constructed innovative multi-storey office building. The floor monitoring system consists of several displacement transducers to measure long-term deformations due to timber and concrete creep and three accelerometers to measure responses to walking forces, the latter being the focus of this paper. Floor response is typically complex and multimodal and the optimal accelerometer locations were decided with the help of the effective independence-driving point residue (EfI-DPR) technique. A novel approach to the EfI-DPR method proposed here uses a combinatorial search algorithm that increases the chances of obtaining the globally optimal solution. Several months' worth of data collected by the monitoring system was analyzed using available industry guidelines, including ISO2631-1: 1997(E), ISO10137: 2007(E) and SCI Publication P354. This enabled the evaluation of the floor performance under real operating conditions.