An efficient modeling technique for floor vibration in multi-story buildings

Analysis of a framed structure for vertical vibration requires a lot of computational efforts because large number of degrees of freedom are generally involved in the dynamic responses. This paper presents an efficient modeling technique for vertical vibration utilizing substructuring technique and super elements. To simplify the modeling procedure each floor in a structure is modeled as a substructure. Only the vertical translational degrees of freedom are selected as master degrees of freedom in the inside of each substructure. At the substructure-column interface, horizontal and rotational degrees of freedom are also included considering the compatibility condition of slabs and columns. For further simplification, the repeated parts in a substructure are modeled as super elements, which reduces computation time required for the construction of system matrices in a substructure. Finally, the Guyan reduction technique is applied to enhance the efficiency of dynamic analysis. In numerical examples, the efficiency and accuracy of the proposed method are demonstrated by comparing the response time histories and the analysis time.