Prediction and Reduction of Building Floor Vibration Using Blocking Floor

Structural vibrations are harmful to the extended life ofany structure. So to mitigate it is of at most importance. Some of the recent research in this field reveal that a simple increase in the thickness of the lowest floor of any building could result in considerable amount of reduction in top floor displacements of the building. Commonly this floors of increased thickness are called Blocking floors and blocking floor method of reducing the vibration is a relatively simple and recent of techniques adopted. A technique which can be classified under system control method, if properly understood will result in a cheap and easy alternative among existing vibration control techniques. The objective here is to find out the effectiveness of blocking floor. Heredifferent steel frame buildingswith and without blocking floor are modelled and analysed in programming environment of MATLAB. Response of the building is measured in terms of the impedance of the building and the maximum displacement at different storey levels of the building when subjected to two types of loadings viz. harmonic and earthquake loadings. In general it is observed that with increase in thickness of the blocking floor, the vibration response of the building is being reduced. Other observations made here in this study suggest that the effectiveness of the blocking floor reduces the as the slenderness of the buildings increase and ideal position of the blocking floors in any building will be in lower floors.