Practical Application of Active Mass Damping for Floors in a Commercial Building

There is a clear need for floor vibration control technology that is high performance, easy to install, commercially competitive, sustainable and reliable over the long term. This technology can be used to retrofit existing structures that are exhibiting vibration problems and also to increase the efficiency and reduce embodied carbon of new-build floor structures. Active mass damping of floors in office, commercial, healthcare, laboratories, residential and other types of buildings has been the subject of a great deal of academic research over the years. This work has focused on the development of control algorithms and performance studies using off-the-shelf accelerometers, control systems and shakers. The newly developed CALM®FLOOR active mass damper (AMD) system integrates all of these components into a single unit, which is easy to install and is able to deliver active control forces to massively enhance damping in floor structures. This chapter describes a program of analysis and testing applied to a building floor structure subject to pedestrian excitation both without and with the presence of the AMD system in operation. It was found that the AMDs were capable of significantly reducing floor responses by around 75% for this fairly typical composite steel-concrete floor system supporting an open-plan office. Deployment of AMDs throughout the building would clearly have the potential to significantly improve the performance of the whole of the environment, with very minimal disruption given the very small size of the AMDs compared with other more significant interventions such as tuned mass dampers or structural modifications.