Vibration Induced by Moving Cranes in High-Tech Buildings due to Rail Pad Materials

In this work, an appropriate rail pad is proposed to reduce the vibration induced by moving cranes near the source location in high-tech buildings. Using a simple two-degrees-of-freedom model and laboratory experiments, we found that a low-cost rubber pad is effective to reduce crane-induced vibration. A number of finite element analyses with the full model are then performed for a high-tech factory and a moving crane. The results show that a decrease in the stiffness of the rail pad can decrease crane-induced vibration, and it is obvious that the proposed low-stiffness rubber rail pad with significant damping is an appropriate material to reduce crane-induced vibration by as much as five dB. In addition, the displacement field using the rubber pad is still much smaller than 2 mm, which is the working requirement for moving cranes.