In condo, apartment unit, your ceiling could be another one floor. nowadays people tend to complain upper unit make lots of noise like foot stomping, furniture dragging etc.

i know brick laying common, party wall is minimum require of 230mm or 9 inch in thickness, how about the floor and ceiling in between two floors, especially condo and apartment unit?

concrete density is also affecting noise transmitting. higher concrete density acts as a mass dampening and reduce the structural noise being transmitted to other unit. that is why when you are in some condo/apartment with good building quality, you found noise is minimal comparing to other condo/apartment.

should the relevant authority revise the requirement (for eg thicken the thickness of floor/ceiling concrete structure, higher concrete density must be fulfilled, adding hollow styrofoam to the structure) in order to cater the residential needs nowadays?

maybe 6inches?

Most of the developers in Malaysia try to cut costs as much as possible therefore they opt-in for the most cost-effective way of building the floor and ceiling in a condo unit. They use no insulation during construction.

Nothing beats carpet but 99% will remove after VP.

standard thickness for slab is 125mm.and developer will minimize the steel and concrete grade as it's only carry live load.

This post has been edited by shaoching: Aug 5 2020, 11:46 AM

the slab thickness depends on the structural design ie. one-way or two-way slab, span width (beams arrangement) etc. There is no clause in the design code for noise insulation in concrete slab. Some of IBS are using hollow slab which has worse noise insulation.

im not in engineering field but i am trying to understand residential structural design nowadays. 125mm (5 inch) concrete slab would be very thin for a condo/apartment floor or ceiling in my perspective. 5 inch thickness apply to landed like terrace house, it is fine.

from my understanding, hollow slab/wall is good to reduce mid to high frequency air borne noise in comparison to solid one with same thickness for eg 9 inch wall. but using hollow slab for a floor/ceiling in condo/apartment it could be a nightmare to users as most of the time upper unit is generating structural noise against the floor.

i believe you are not to referring to the so called airborne noise (such as human voice: talking, singing, laughing, crying, screaming, shouting, yelling etc.) but referring to the noises from hard object hitting/knocking/dropping on the floor.

Floor loading for condo and landed shall be similar, columns will take care of the loads from upper floors.