Assements of Level of Comfort on a Vibrating Structure

The serviceability limit state of structures is subject to increasing attention. Flooring-systems may encounter vertical vibrations that may be perceived as annoying by stationary persons sitting or standing on the structure. This can happen on office floors, on grand stands etc. where humans in motion (for instance people walking or jumping) can bring the structure into vibration. The paper looks into human perception of decaying oscillations of floors by doing experiments with a test floor with stationary humans atop. An impulsive load is directed to the floor, and after the decay, the persons on the floor are asked to rate the level of discomfort on a scale from 1 to 10, and to assess the size of floor displacement (the initial amplitude of the decay). Tests are carried out with different numbers of people present on the test floor, and with different initial amplitudes of the decay. The paper presents tendencies in results and seeks to explain some of the observed relationships with offset in an analytical model describing the dynamic behaviour of the human-floor system.