Acceleration Response of Prestressed Cable RC Truss Floor System Subjected to Heel-Drop Loading

This paper describes and discusses the vibration serviceability of the innovative prestressed cable-reinforced concrete truss (i.e., prestressed cable RC truss, PCT for abbreviation) floor system subjected to heel-drop impact loading, based on the theoretical and experimental studies. In the theoretical analysis, the PCT floor system is idealized as an anisotropic rectangular plate with four built-in edges and the weighted residual method was used. A field test was carried out to investigate the dynamic characteristics of the PCT floor system and to validate and demonstrate the convergence of the theoretical solution. As a result, the experimental results agree well with the theoretical ones. The decrease of vibration is dramatic in the direction perpendicular to the PCT girder and is at a slower rate along the direction of the girder. The investigated PCT floor system has a low fundamental natural frequency (<4 Hz) with low damping ratio (≈2%). According to one standard of vibration criteria, the innovative floor system exhibits satisfactory vibration perceptibility.