Vibrational performance of wood floors in traditional residential timber structures in southwest China

As one of the main forms of traditional timber buildings, the column-and-tie timber (Chuan-Dou style) structure is still widely used in South China. Compared to global behavior of those structures, less attention was paid to the vibrational performance of the wood floor systems in the structures. In this study, both traditional wood floor systems and nailed cross-laminated timber (NCLT) floor systems were tested in a full-scale column-and-tie structure. The vibrational properties of the two floor systems, including the fundamental frequency, the deflections at static point load root-mean-square amplitude, were obtained and compared. It was found that in terms of the fundamental frequency and the deflections at static point load, both floors meet the suggested requirements. In the sense of root-mean-square amplitudes, the vibrational performance of both floors is not satisfying. The vibrational performance of the NCLT floor is better than that of the traditional floor, and the vibrational performance of the NCLT floor may be improved further by increasing the number of nails between laminations and changing the boundary conditions in the subsequent study, which is only our speculation, and the real situation needs to be further investigated. This research helps to understand the vibrational performance of traditional wood floors and provides a possible floor system with better vibration serviceability in column-and-tie timber structures.