Innovative passive viscoelastic damper to suppress excessive floor vibrations

Due to changes in construction methods and new building layouts in recent years, human activities such as walking, dancing and aerobics have become major sources of floor vibrations. Excessive floor vibration is a cause of annoyance and discomfort to occupants. Excessive floor vibrations are realised after completion of construction or following structural modifications. Hence rectification measures would be required to minimise floor accelerations. This paper proposes a new innovative passive viscoelastic damper to reduce floor vibrations. This damper can be easily tuned to the fundamental frequency of the floor and can be designed to achieve various damping values. This paper discusses the analytical development of the damper and further experimental results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the developed damper.