Assessment of the human comfort of steel-concrete composite floors

Resumo

This research work aims to investigate the dynamic structural response of steel-concrete composite
floors from the point of view of human comfort, when subjected to human walking. This way, the investigated
structural model is associated to a steel-concrete composite floor building which is composed of a hot-rolled
framing system, with a total area equal to 1300 m2. The floor system is used for normal school occupancy and is
supported by steel-concrete composite columns with a ceiling height of 3.40m. The proposed numerical model,
developed for the floor building dynamic analysis, adopted the usual mesh refinement techniques present in the
Finite Element Method (FEM) simulations and implemented in the ANSYS program. In this numerical model,
the steel-concrete composite floor girders were represented by three-dimensional beam elements, where flexural
and torsion effects are considered. On the other hand, the concrete slab was represented by shell finite elements.
Both materials (steel and concrete) present an elastic behavior. The complete interaction between the concrete
slab and steel beams was considered in the analysis, i.e., the finite element model coupled all the nodes between
the steel beams and concrete slabs, in order to prevent the occurrence of any slip. Regarding the structural

behavior of the connections present in the investigated structure, the beam-to-beam connections and the beam-to-
column connections were considered as rigid joints. After that, having in mind to determine if the investigated

floor framing system satisfies the human comfort criterion for walking vibration, the dynamic structural response
of the investigated floor was analysed based on the peak accelerations values. These values were calculated and
classified according to several human comfort criteria, considering situations of the current design practice.