Reliability based design for vibration control of light steel floor structures

Abstract eng:
The use of cold-formed elements to construct the floors of light steel frame buildings are becoming more common, especially in the South African context. Poor serviceability due to excessive vibration is a concern when designing these floor systems. Even though assessment of lightweight floors for vibration is well-researched and various acceptability criteria for continuous vibrations are available, few take direct account of the uncertainty associated with the prediction of a floor’s vibration response. As an ideal method to account for uncertainty, a reliability based approach can be followed where uncertainty in both the prediction capacity of vibration models as well as the uncertainty in the acceptability of the level of vibration can be included in the design procedure. The use of reliability based design principles to evaluate the probability of failure at the vibration limit state is demonstrated using a Monte Carlo analysis method. The resulting reliability index is compared to published norms to establish a floor structure’s suitability. The fully probabilistic method provides insight into the importance of considering the non-deterministic nature of the problem and motivates further research in this field to improve the rational basis of design for floor vibration.

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