Thornton Tomasetti and FSD Active Limited (FSDA), a U.K-.based high-tech start-up specializing in active control solutions for floor vibrations, have signed a strategic collaborative agreement, formalizing relationship Thornton Tomasetti’s long-term interest in and support for FSDA’s Calm Floor active mass damping (AMD) technology. Calm Floor controls building floor vibrations and enabling more sustainable structures.
Active mass damping systems reduce floor vibrations by effectively damping them with a motor. Each lightweight and compact unit can fit on or under building floors and provide a potential reduction in vibration by up to a factor of 10. This allows engineers to design modern, efficient and sustainable buildings with versatile long-span floors and greatly reduced embodied carbon.
“Calm Floor is one of the most exciting vibration control products to emerge in the last 20 years,” Thornton Tomasetti Principal Michael Wesolowsky, a leader in the firm’s acoustics and vibration group, said. “It is the world’s first commercially available mechatronics device specifically developed to replace structural materials as a solution for excessive resonant floor vibrations. This is crucial as vibration serviceability has become the governing design criterion for many modern open-plan, long-span commercial floors, determining the size and shape of millions of square feet that Thornton Tomasetti designs every year in the U.S. and around the world.”
Using the same principle as noise cancelling headphones, but on a much larger scale, Calm Floor continually monitors floor vibrations and instantly generates a force that acts on the structure to cancel them out. “Field trials have demonstrated that Calm Floor provides additional floor damping ratio, typically of the order of 10-15%, which is far beyond anything else on the market,” FSDA Founder and Director Aleksandar Pavic said. “It is also more cost-effective than other passive technologies or increasing structural sizes to control vibrations.”
Additionally, Calm Floor enables the use of modern and environmentally friendly lightweight floor decking solutions, such as cross-laminated timber, wider utilization of which is often hampered by potentially excessive walking-induced vibration.
“Throwing huge amounts of steel and concrete at resonant vibration problems goes against all the principles of lean design and is woefully wasteful in the context of today’s climate emergency,” FSDA
Founder and CEO Paul Reynolds said. “Calm Floor also provides an effective and convenient solution to previously intractable vibration problems. Its flexibility makes Calm Floor very easy to install and move around to the floor area where walking-induced vibration control is needed.”
Typical applications of Calm Floor include commercial offices, retail, airports, education, research and healthcare. The damping system is particularly suitable for change-of-use applications where building flexibility is critical. The first commercial installations of Calm Floor units are scheduled in the next quarter.
