Dynamic analyses of hollow core slabs : Experimental and numerical analyses of an existing floor

Abstract: For intermediate floors in residential and office buildings, as well as in parking garages and malls, there is a wide use of hollow core concrete slabs in Sweden today. Hollow core slabs are precast and prestressed concrete elements with cylindrical-shaped voids extending along the length of the slab. These structural elements have the advantage compared to cast-in-situ concrete slabs that they have a high strength, due to the prestressing, and that the voids allow for a lower self-weight. Additionally, the voids allow for a reduction in the use of concrete material. These characteristics offer possibilities to build long-span floors with slender designs. However, a consequence of the slenderness of the slabs is that such floors have an increased sensitivity to vibrations induced by various dynamic loads. In residential and office buildings vibrations are primarily caused by human activity, and therefore concerns related to the serviceability of such floors are raised. These vibrations are often not related to problems with structural integrity, but rather to different aspects of comfort of the residents or workers. The aim of this thesis is to provide additional information regarding the dynamic behavior of hollow core floors. An experimental modal analysis has been performed on an existing floor in an office building. The dynamic properties in the form of natural frequencies, mode shapes, damping ratios and frequency response functions were derived and analyzed from these measurements. Subsequently, several finite element models were developed, aiming to reproduce the experimental dynamic behavior of the studied floor. The measurements initially showed some unexpected dynamic responses of the floor. For this reason, more advanced methods of signal analyses were applied to the data. The analyses showed that the slab has some closely spaced modes and that the modes of the floor are complex to a certain degree. The finite element models were studied with different configurations. In particular, the effect the model size, boundary conditions, material properties and potential structural discontinuities have on the dynamic response of the slab was studied. Sufficiently good agreement has been achieved between the experimental and numerical results in terms of natural frequencies and mode shapes. The acceleration amplitude responses of the numerical models were generally higher than the ones obtained from the measurements, which leads to difficulties in matching of the frequency response functions.