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A simplified method to account for human‐human interaction in the prediction of pedestrian‐induced vibrations
Author(s) -
Wei Xinxin
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
structural control and health monitoring
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.587
H-Index - 62
eISSN - 1545-2263
pISSN - 1545-2255
DOI - 10.1002/stc.2753
Subject(s) - serviceability (structure) , pedestrian , social force model , vibration , range (aeronautics) , structural engineering , monotonic function , computer science , simulation , mathematics , engineering , acoustics , physics , mathematical analysis , transport engineering , aerospace engineering
Summary Vibration serviceability under pedestrian‐induced loading is often the governing criterion for slender footbridge design. During the design stage, the structural response is generally predicted using simplified load models. In these models, neither human‐human interaction (HHI) nor human‐structure interaction (HSI) is taken into account. The present paper starts by characterizing the impact of HHI on the resulting structural response. A widely applied social force model is adopted. The model parameters are adapted to allow for a good approximation of pedestrian flows on footbridges. The HHI‐effect on the resulting crowd‐induced loading and structural response is investigated by means of a numerical study for a relevant range of pedestrian densities. The results demonstrate that an increase in pedestrian density coincides with a decrease in the mean walking speed and the step frequency among the pedestrians in the crowd, as expected. However, no monotonic decrease in the inter‐person variability in step frequency is observed for increasing densities. The inter‐person variability in step frequency is found to also depend on the width of the walkway and the pedestrians' desired room for manoeuvre, which determines the number of parallel pedestrian lanes that can coexist. This paper provides an alternative to the computationally expensive social force model, by translating the HHI‐effect into an equivalent distribution of step frequencies among the pedestrians in the crowd. The results demonstrate that the simplified method allows for a good approximation of the HHI‐effect on the resulting crowd‐induced loading.