Floor impact noise is a significant social issue in high-rise residential buildings, with growing demand for effective mitigation of heavy-weight impact noise. However, conventional resilient cushioning materials, commonly proposed in previous studies, have been reported to suffer from deteriorated noise reduction performance over long-term use. To address this limitation, this study proposes a non-contact floor structure using repulsive force between permanent magnets and experimentally investigates its noise reduction performance. As an initial experiment, a 100 × 100 cm small scale model was fabricated, and impact ball tests were conducted to compare its noise reduction performance against conventional resilient cushioning materials such as EVA foam. The tests were performed by dropping a 2.5 kg impact ball from a height of 1 m, and the resulting heavy impact noise was measured in decibels (dB) at the lower floor. The measured data were utilized to evaluate the noise reduction performance of the structure. Subsequently, the identical structure was applied to the entire floor of a real-scale test space, and heavy-weight impact noise was measured under realistic building conditions. The results demonstrated that the proposed non-contact permanent magnets structure effectively suppressed the transmission of impact vibrations and achieved impact noise reduction performance exceeding that of existing materials.
Kim et al. (Wed,) studied this question.