Comfort Level Investigation of Chromite Composite Floor System under Human Walking Load

This paper's main objective is to determine the comfortableness of a composite structural floor system known as Chromite. For this purpose, twenty-eight Chromite panels were developed via the Finite Element Method (FEM) to find their Fundamental Natural Frequency (FNF). Then, the studied panels are categorized as Low-Frequency Floor (LFF) or High-Frequency Floor (HFF) regarding to their FNFs. Peak accelerations of low and high-frequency panels and also static stiffness of high-frequency panels were determined and compared with the limit value affirmed by the American Institute of Steel and Construction (AISC). Effects of various parameters were determined on changing FNF and also peak acceleration and static stiffness of the studied panels, depend to kind of panel as LFF or HFF. The results demonstrated that although some factors decreased and increased peak acceleration and static stiffness of the Chromite system, respectively, the panels could reach high vibration levels resulting in lack of comfortableness for users. In addition, the results show that the Chromite floor system needs to improve to be comfortable for users.

Keywords:

Chromite floor system , comfortableness , human walking load , static and dynamic response , low and high frequency floor