Continuing Prediction of Heavy/Hard Impacts on Resilient Sports Floors in Existing Buildings

Previously we have presented a method to predict the acceleration from heavy/hard impacts in existing buildings to replace more traditional methods. The traditional methods for the assessment of noise and vibration due to heavy/hard impacts 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. The new method consists of measuring on- site vibrational transfer functions, measuring a force pulse that a given weight will exert onto a resilient floor and then combining those elements to predict the vibration. This method can predict the acceleration or vibration in a building due to any arbitrary combination of impact source and resilient flooring. The new measurements obtained for this paper were conducted in a true field application in both narrow and one-third octave bands. The predictions obtained are compared to on-site weight drop measurements in order to qualify the predictive model.