Structural Engineering & Statics
where the load goes
Concept

Footfall — where it appears

A person walking, treated as a periodic force with harmonics at multiples of the pacing rate. It is the excitation a floor's frequency has to be kept away from, which is why a floor's vibration check is a frequency check rather than a load check.

Named by 2 essays across 2 fields — each of them below, with the objects they name alongside it.

Which floor frequencies a 2 Hz pace punishes. The response factor of a floor of 12 tonnes modal mass and 3.0% damping, against its own natural frequency, under a walker at 2 steps per second. The peaks are at 2, 4, 6, 8 Hz — the harmonics of the pace — and they fall away sharply: four peaks, each smaller than the one below it, because the harmonics of walking get smaller. A floor at 2 Hz reaches R = 31 and one at 8 Hz reaches 6. Between them the floor is quiet.

The floor that is strong and unusable

A floor can satisfy every strength check, deflect less than the limit, and still be rejected by the people who work on it — because somebody walking across it at two steps a second happens to be exciting it at exactly the rate it likes to move.

dynamics · Floor vibration Every reason a building is stiffer than its model, added up. The computed natural frequency of a floor, and the same frequency after each source of stiffness that was deliberately left out is put back. Not one of them is a modelling error. Cladding and partitions are stiffness nobody is allowed to rely on for strength; a nominally pinned connection is never pinned; a slab acts with its beam whether or not shear connectors were provided; and concrete between the cracks is stiffer than a cracked section assumes. Together they multiply the stiffness by 1.83 and the frequency by 1.35, because a frequency is the square root of a stiffness, and every factor is halved on the way through. The asymmetry is the finding: leaving stiffness out makes a deflection conservative and a vibration check unconservative in the direction that matters, since a stiffer floor has a higher frequency and sits further from the footfall range. The model here reads 4.40 Hz against a 5.2 Hz criterion and fails it; the floor reads 5.95 Hz and passes. The correction that would have got it right is exactly the stiffness nobody is willing to count on.

Stiffer than the model said

Measured natural frequencies of finished buildings come out between ten and sixty per cent above the values computed for them, consistently and in one direction only. Nothing on the list of reasons is a modelling error: every one is a real source of stiffness deliberately left out — and leaving stiffness out is conservative for deflection and unconservative for vibration.

deflection · Measured stiffness

Named alongside it

The objects these essays reach for when they reach for this one.

DampingFloor vibrationNatural frequencyServiceabilityCalibrationComposite actionDeflectionJoint stiffnessModal massMode shapeModellingNon-structural stiffness

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