ISEC 10


EFFECTS OF HUMAN-STRUCTURE INTERACTIONS ON THE DYNAMIC PROPERTIES OF BUILDING FLOORS SUSCEPTIBLE TO VIBRATIONS

MEHDI SETAREH, STEPHANIE RENARD


Abstract

Excessive vibrations of building floors due to human movements have become an important vibration serviceability problem for building designers and owners. A series of vibration tests on a full-scale laboratory floor with different numbers of humans in various postures were conducted. Using this data, the dynamic properties of a two-degree-of-freedom (2-DOF) dynamic system representing groups of people in different postures were computed. A 3-DOF model representing the floor and humans was developed and its dynamic properties were defined in terms of non-dimensional parameters. The dynamic properties of the floor were measured when occupied by groups of people in different postures and compared to those predicted using the 3- DOF dynamic model considering the identified human models. The results showed that the predicted properties were within the range of those found from the measurements, which validated the identified human dynamic models. This study also showed how the presence of humans can affect the natural frequency and damping ratio of a floor system.

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