Human structure interaction: approaches to consider crowd effects

Resumo

Pedestrians walking in slender footbridges may lead to dynamic behavior that does not satisfy the
serviceability limits proposed in codes. On the other hand, the presence of pedestrians may bring beneficial effects
to the structural behavior by providing damping to the coupled system structure plus pedestrians. In this work,
three approaches are assessed to evaluate the response of a footbridge in a crowd situation: (i) pedestrians
represented by a moving load model (MLM) applied to an equivalent single degree of freedom model (SDoFM)
of the empty structure (ii) pedestrians represented by MLM applied to an equivalent (SDoFM) of the occupied
structure whose modal properties are obtained from free vibration analyses and, (iii) pedestrians represented as
biodynamic models (BM) walking along the footbridge deck. Comparisons between the results in terms of the
maximum midspan acceleration of a composite footbridge using the three formulations evaluated herein are
performed.