Deflections of Uniformly Loaded Floors. A Beam-Spring Analog.

Abstract : A new method for computing the performance of uniformly loaded wood floors is presented. The procedure presents a floor as a simple structure consisting of a beam supported by elastic springs. The method computes midspan joist deflections which are virtually identical to those obtained from a large-scale finite element program, but a fraction of the computational effort. Also, computations agree very closely with laboratory results. A simple BASIC program is presented for implementing the procedure.