Assessment of steel‐concrete composite floors dynamic response when subjected to people walking

Abstract

This work aims to assess the people‐structure dynamic interaction effect on the steel‐concrete composite floor's structural behaviour, based on of experimental tests and numerical modelling. The investigated structure is associated to a steel‐concrete composite floor building with total area of 1300 m2. In this investigation, biodynamic systems like “spring‐mass‐damper” models with one degree of freedom (SDOF) were used to simulate the people's walking on the floor. The numerical model, developed for the floor building dynamic analysis, adopted the usual mesh refinement techniques present in finite element method (FEM) simulations implemented in the ANSYS software. Based on the experimental results calibration, the floor dynamic response was analysed to study the influence of the people's step frequencies, number of people walking and stationary on the floor, structural damping, and different trajectories of people walking. The floor dynamic response was determined based on the displacement and acceleration values, and compared with those calculated utilising traditional dynamic loading mathematical models. After that, the structural system dynamic response maximum values were compared with the recommended limits proposed in design codes for excessive vibration's assessments to study the human comfort.