Prediction of Acoustic Performance of Composite Steel Floors

One method of constructing lightweight concrete floors in residential dwellings is to use a trapezoidal profile steel pan as a permanent form for a relatively thin pour of concrete. The resulting structure has enhanced stiffness to weight ratio due to the composite action between the steel and concrete, and the inherent improved stiffness of the profiled cross section. However the floor is strongly orthogonal and the composite action makes the bending stiffness’s difficult to calculate. Common models for predicting the sound insulation of panels are not accurate. Heckl has provided a solution for the sound transmission of an orthogonal panel, which requires a double numerical integration, however this is time consuming to solve especially if accuracy at high frequencies is required. The current work reports a successful use of ANSI C-2011 Standard for Composite Floors to calculate the bending stiffness’s of the floor in orthogonal directions and implementation of a GaussLegendre method for carrying out the double integration.