Dynamic analysis in a bi-axial hollow slab submitted to human actions

Abstract

The bi-axial hollow slab is the result of applying a technology that removes concrete from the least useful region and replaces it with hollow plastic spheres. This technique leads to material economy and self-weight saving, without considerable inertial loss, enabling larger and more flexible spans. Consequently, these spans are vulnerable to unwanted vibrations and dynamic acceleration caused by external actions, such as movements produced by human activity. This way, understanding the dynamic behavior of this technology and confronting it with normative limits on the project phase is essential for a good performance in the serviceability limit state, bringing comfort to the user. This paper studies the dynamic behavior of a bi-axial hollow slab submitted to human actions, such as jumping, dancing, clapping, moving the body, and moving and clapping at the same time. For that, this work made a numerical model of the structure and applied dynamic actions to it. The numerical results show that, for most of the actions, normative limits are satisfied, but the slab presents excessive accelerations in the case of jumping and dancing.