A new damper system for walking induced floor vibration control

This paper presents analytical and experimental studies on the application of an innovative viscoelastic tuned mass damper system to mitigate disturbing footfall induced vibrations observed on a real office floor. The damper system consists of a number of steel-rubber sandwich beams arranged in a distributed form. Different tuning scenarios were investigated via FE simulations, demonstrating that dampers appropriately tuned to multi frequencies would be more effective than those tuned to a single frequency. The influence of the installation of the dampers on a floor bay on the response of the adjacent bay is also discussed. The custom-made dampers have been successfully installed on the existing floor without requiring any architectural or structural modifications. Results from numerical investigation and field tests show that the dampers can reduce at least 40% of the floor response to an acceptable level for human comfort in an office environment.