Vibration transmission at floor/joist connections in wood frame buildings

Floors in wood frame buildings usually consist of a number of Oriented Strand Board (OSB) sheets supported by a series of parallel wood joists. The OSB subfloor is connected to the joists by a number of equally spaced screws. When predicting flanking transmission in wood frame buildings using statistical energy analysis (SEA), two issues need to be addressed. Firstly, one needs to determine whether the joist should be treated as a beam or as a plate strip. Secondly, the frequency dependent behaviour of the joist/floor connection should be characterized. Both topics will be discussed in the following paragraphs, which deal with structure-borne sound transmission in the direction normal to the joists.