Prediction of Heavy Weight Drops on Resilient Sports Floors in Existing Buildings

Currently, the assessment of noise and vibration due to heavy weight drops in an existing building can be cumbersome and time consuming, have low repeatability, and does not allow for evaluation of additional solutions not present at the time of testing. This paper will present a method to solve those problems and is broken up into three parts. The first part is the laboratory assessment of the force pulse that a given weight will exert onto a resilient floor. The second part is a method to quickly obtain the in-situ transfer function between the force injected into the building and the resulting vibration elsewhere in the building. The third part combines the previous two items to predict the acceleration in a building due to any arbitrary combination of impact source and resilient floor. The results obtained will be compared to on-site weight drop measurements in order to qualify the predictive model.