Estimating the Characteristic Vertical Response of a Flexible Footbridge Due to Crowd Loading

Joe Keogh, Colin C. Caprani, Paul Archbold, Paul Fanning

Research output: Contribution to conferencePaperpeer-review

Abstract

The issue of excessive vibration of footbridges due to pedestrian loading is now well documented. Bridge vibrations produced from a crowd of pedestrians have been estimated by modifying the effect caused by a single pedestrian by an enhancement factor to take crowd synchronization into account. In this paper this approach is extended to account for the fact that all pedestrians will not have the same pacing frequencies, and the effects of distributions of pacing frequency and other parameters on the enhancement factor are investigated. It is shown that this more faithful representation of pedestrian crowd walking behaviour gives reduced vibration response compared to the fully homogenous crowd case. Based on these results, enhancement factors for predicting the response due to a crowd from the predicted accelerations of a single pedestrian are proposed. Further, the results are compared with published test results to indicate that the model is reasonable.
Original languageEnglish
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2010
EventBCRI Conference - Cork, Ireland
Duration: 1 Jan 201031 Dec 2010

Conference

ConferenceBCRI Conference
Country/TerritoryIreland
CityCork
Period1/01/1031/12/10
OtherBridge and Concrete Research in Ireland Conference

Keywords

  • excessive vibration
  • footbridges
  • pedestrian loading
  • crowd synchronization
  • pacing frequencies
  • vibration response
  • enhancement factors
  • accelerations
  • test results

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Estimating the Characteristic Vertical Response of a Flexible Footbridge Due to Crowd Loading'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this