Floating Floor on:
[Wikipedia]
[Google]
[Amazon]
A floating floor is a
A floating floor is a floor
A floor is the bottom surface of a room or vehicle. Floors vary from simple dirt in a cave to many layered surfaces made with modern technology. Floors may be stone, wood, bamboo, metal or any other material that can support the expected load ...
that does not need to be nailed or glued to the subfloor. The term floating floor refers to the installation method, but is often used synonymously with laminate flooring
Laminate flooring (also called floating wood tile in the United States) is a multi-layer synthetic flooring product fused together with a lamination process. Laminate flooring simulates wood (or sometimes stone) with a photographic applique l ...
. It is applied now to other coverings such as floating tile systems and vinyl flooring in a domestic context.
A sprung floor
A sprung floor is a floor that absorbs shocks, giving it a softer feel. Such floors are considered the best kind for dance and indoor sports and physical education, and can enhance performance and greatly reduce injuries. Modern sprung floors ar ...
is a special type of floating floor designed to enhance sports or dance performance. In general though the term refers to a floor used to reduce noise
Noise is unwanted sound considered unpleasant, loud or disruptive to hearing. From a physics standpoint, there is no distinction between noise and desired sound, as both are vibrations through a medium, such as air or water. The difference aris ...
or vibration
Vibration is a mechanical phenomenon whereby oscillations occur about an equilibrium point. The word comes from Latin ''vibrationem'' ("shaking, brandishing"). The oscillations may be periodic, such as the motion of a pendulum—or random, su ...
.
A domestic floating floor might be constructed over a subfloor or even over an existing floor. It can consist of a glass fibre
Glass fiber ( or glass fibre) is a material consisting of numerous extremely fine fibers of glass.
Glassmakers throughout history have experimented with glass fibers, but mass manufacture of glass fiber was only made possible with the inventio ...
, felt
Felt is a textile material that is produced by matting, condensing and pressing fibers together. Felt can be made of natural fibers such as wool or animal fur, or from synthetic fibers such as petroleum-based acrylic or acrylonitrile or wood ...
or cork
Cork or CORK may refer to:
Materials
* Cork (material), an impermeable buoyant plant product
** Cork (plug), a cylindrical or conical object used to seal a container
***Wine cork
Places Ireland
* Cork (city)
** Metropolitan Cork, also known as G ...
layer for sound insulation with neoprene
Neoprene (also polychloroprene) is a family of synthetic rubbers that are produced by polymerization of chloroprene.Werner Obrecht, Jean-Pierre Lambert, Michael Happ, Christiane Oppenheimer-Stix, John Dunn and Ralf Krüger "Rubber, 4. Emulsion R ...
pads holding up a laminate floor. There is a gap between the floating floor and the walls to decouple them and allow for expansion; this gap is covered with skirting board
In architecture, a baseboard (also called skirting board, skirting, wainscoting, mopboard, trim, floor molding, or base molding) is usually wooden or vinyl board covering the lowest part of an interior wall. Its purpose is to cover the joint be ...
s or mouldings.
Floating floors as used in sound studios can be either just larger versions of the domestic variety, or much larger constructions with slabs of concrete to keep the resonance
Resonance describes the phenomenon of increased amplitude that occurs when the frequency of an applied periodic force (or a Fourier component of it) is equal or close to a natural frequency of the system on which it acts. When an oscil ...
frequency down. The manufacture of integrated circuits uses massive floating floors with hundreds of tons in weight of concrete to avoid vibration affecting mask alignment.
Floating floors are one of the requirements for the THX high-fidelity sound reproduction standard for movie theaters, screening rooms, home theaters, computer speakers, gaming consoles, and car audio systems.
While floating floors add to the appeal of a home, they are not recommended for areas that may get wet, i.e. bathrooms and near exterior doors.
See also
*Flooring
Flooring is the general term for a permanent covering of a floor, or for the work of installing such a floor covering. Floor covering is a term to generically describe any finish material applied over a floor structure to provide a walking surface ...
*Floor vibration In the design of floor systems in buildings vibrations caused by walking, dancing, mechanical equipment or other rhythmic excitation may cause an annoyance to the occupants or impede the function of sensitive equipment. A calculation procedure to ...
*Vibration isolation Vibration isolation is the process of isolating an object, such as a piece of equipment, from the source of vibrations.
Vibration is undesirable in many domains, primarily engineered systems and habitable spaces, and methods have been developed to p ...
References