For wood floor systems, their vibration performance is significantly dependent on the conditions of their supports, specifically the rigidity of the support. Detrimental effects could result if the floor supports do not have sufficient rigidity. This is special ture for floor supporting beams. The problem of vibrating floor due to flexible supporting beams can be solved through proper design of the supporting beams. However, there is currently no criterion set for the minimum requirement for floor supporting beam stiffness to ensure the beam is rigid enough. Designers’ current practice is to use the uniform load deflection criteria specified in the code for designing the supporting beams. This criterion is based on certain ratios of the floor span (e.g. L/360, L/480 etc.). The disadvantage of this approach is that it allows larger deflections for longer-span beams than for shorter beams. This means that engineers have to use their experience and judgement to select a proper ratio, particularly for the long-span beams. Therefore, a better vibration-controlled design criterion for supporting beams is needed.
It is recommended to further verify the ruggedness of the proposed stiffness criterion for floor supporting beams using new field supporting beam data whenever they become available.