Walking Vibration Response of High-Frequency Floors Supporting Sensitive Equipment

High-frequency steel and concrete floors are often used to support sensitive equipment to minimize vibration response to walking. Equipment vibration tolerance limits are sometimes expressed as waveform peak acceleration, and are more often expressed as narrowband spectral acceleration, or one-third octave spectral velocity. Current methods predict the waveform peak response after a footstep. However, postprocessing beyond what is practical for typical design office usage is often required to predict responses directly comparable to spectral tolerance limits. Also, current methods are not calibrated to provide a specific level of conservatism. This paper presents new methods for predicting the waveform peak acceleration, narrowband spectral acceleration maximum magnitude, and one-third octave spectral velocity maximum magnitude. A total of 89 walking vibration tests were performed on five high-frequency floor bays. The measurements are used to assess the precision of the proposed methods and to calibrate the prediction methods to provide a specific probability that the actual response will exceed the predicted response. The measurements are compared to predictions by the proposed method and five established methods.