The Research of Time-History Response Analysis of Floor Vibration Based on Simulation of Group Walking

Occupant comfort when large-span floor systems are subjected to crowd-induced vibrations has become an important index to evaluate serviceability of structures. Control of deflections stipulated in current code requirements cannot sufficiently represent the serviceability requirements of floor systems. Harmonic vibration analysis procedure is introduced by foreign code requirements to deal with floor vibrations, with the restriction to those with regular shapes and simple boundary conditions. This paper proposes a time-history analysis program for the generation of load induced by human activities based on the stimulation of group walking, analyzing the floor systems with special boundary condition, span and damping by time-history method. Compared with the results of crowd-induced load experiment, the analytical results confirmed the accuracy of this analysis procedure in representing the characteristic of crowd-induced floor vibrations, which is applicable for evaluation of floor systems with arbitrary shape and boundary condition.