Vertical Vibration of Complex and Slender Footbridges due to Stochastic Crowd-Induced Excitation

The principle aim of this paper is to study the crowd-induced vertical dynamic responses of the complex and flexible footbridges. Stochastic crowd flow of real traffic conditions is modelled with Monte-Carlo method and a numerical integration-based algorithm for structural vibration under crowd excitation is developed. Based on a real footbridge of complicated vibration modes, the crowd-induced acceleration responses are obtained, with the probabilistic characteristics of the peak acceleration being further studied. The calculation results indicate that the random crowd-induced peak response has a lognormal distribution, of which the average value is proportional to the increase of crowd density and the pacing frequency coherence. The algorithm for stochastic crowd loading and the analysis results provided can be valuable for reference in vibration assessment towards footbridges of complicated structural types.

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