Numerical and experimental investigation on structure-borne sound transmission in multilayered concrete structures

Abstract Environmental vibrations in cities are transmitted to buildings and propagate through the buildings via complex paths composed of the structural elements in the building, such as concrete slabs, beams, and columns. In this study, the transmission characteristics of such structure-borne sound in building structures composed of concrete were experimentally and numerically investigated. The vibration and radiated sound characteristics of a five-storey concrete structure obtained experimentally through an excitation test using the hammering method and numerically through wave-based numerical calculations are presented and compared. In this study, the finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) method, which treats the target structure as a composition of two-dimensional plate and one-dimensional beam elements to enable a low-cost calculation, is applied as a wave-based scheme. The propagation characteristics of the vibration and sound within the same floor and across different floors were investigated by considering various combinations of receiver and source points, and the structure-borne sound transmission characteristics of a concrete structure with frame elements are discussed.