Dynamic Response of Girder Footbridges with Supplemental Damping

Pedestrian-induced vibration commonly governs serviceability criteria in footbridge design. Simplified approaches to assess these vibrations have resulted in undesirable levels of vibration in built footbridges, highlighting the need to develop more realistic representations of the pedestrian loads as well as approaches to mitigate their effects. To represent these types of loads in an accurate manner it is necessary to consider the anthropometric characteristics (inter-subject variability), the inability that pedestrians have to transmit the same force in each step (intra-subject variability), the interaction between pedestrians and the lock-in effect. It has been observed that some footbridges have experiences serviceability problems due to vibrations with excessive magnitudes. In some of these cases, the human-induced vibration cannot be controlled effectively by using conventional approaches so the use of supplemental damping devices was required. Evaluation of the dynamic response at the design stage under the most realistic representation of pedestrian is crucial to satisfying the comfort criteria. After this evaluation, in cases where the comfort criteria is not fulfilled, an option available to designers is to employ supplemental damping devices to mitigate the pedestrian-induced vibrations. This work presents a parametric study showing the high efficiency of damping devices to mitigate human-induced vibrations in girder footbridges under diverse pedestrian loading scenarios.

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