Evaluation of human-induced vibration of continuous footbridges

With the development of construction materials and the introduction of high strength steel and concrete, the human-induced vibration became a dominant criterion for the design of pedestrian bridges. Currently, longer spans and lightweight bridges have been comprised in most of design trends. This leads to lower the natural frequencies of the system which have a great effect on the dynamic performance of bridges subjected to human activities. Although the design of steel footbridges could reach the optimum level of design in terms of strength criterion, it might not reach the acceptance level for vibration condition. This will enforce the designer to choose section profiles with higher inertia to enhance stiffness of the whole system. This paper presents an overall assessment for floor vibration problem due to pedestrian induced vertical forces on continuous composite footbridges. The footfall method presented by concrete centre “CCIP-016” is adopted in this study to evaluate the response factor and acceleration of pedestrian bridges using a FEA software package “Robot Structural Analysis”.