Further prediction of heavy weight drops on resilient sports floors in existing buildings

The issue of heavy weight drops in buildings has been an issue for a number of years. Currently, the assessment of the noise and vibration due to heavy weight drops in an existing building can be quite cumbersome. All of the potential floor coverings and the heavy weights need to be shipped to site. Typically, the impact sources used onsite are whatever happens to be present at the site. Overall, this testing regimen is quite arduous, time consuming, and not very repeatable. In recent years, the authors have built a drop tower to repeatedly test fitness flooring performance in a controlled environment. This paper looks at ways to predict the in situ performance of fitness flooring by incorporating force pulse data collected from a drop tower and measured transfer functions. This would be a narrow band analysis that can be converted into one-third octave bands as opposed to the one-third octave band analysis that others have suggested. That analysis used a method similar to the Delta IIC in ASTM E2179.