A Review of Evaluation Methods of Standards for Structural Vibration Serviceability under Crowd Walking

Abstract

Structures such as long-span footbridges, floors, and long cantilevers are vulnerable to vibration serviceability problems under crowd walking, which should be taken into consideration during the structural design, operation, and maintenance stages. Standards have been developed to enable designers to assess the vibration serviceability of structures using simplified load models that simulate crowd-induced loading. To facilitate engineers in quickly selecting appropriate standards for vibration serviceability design, ten current standards were collected which deal with the assessment of structural vibration serviceability under walking loads, including the French “Assessment of vibrational behavior of footbridges under pedestrian loading” (2006), the German “Design of footbridges guideline” (2007), the Chinese “Technical standard for human comfort of the floor vibration” (2019), etc. The ten standards were reviewed and evaluated from three aspects including the crowd loading model, structural response calculation method, and vibration serviceability evaluation standard in this paper. Through summary and comparison between standards, three directions for future improvement and perfection of the standards were proposed: the challenges of the improvement of the standards focus on the establishment of the refined stochastic load model, the analysis of the crowd–structure coupling system, and the modelling of multifactor coupling serviceability evaluation indexes.

Structural Vibration Comfort: A Review of Recent Developments

“…For vibrations with a single primary frequency, such as human-induced vibrations and windinduced vibrations, peak acceleration is generally adopted [14,91,[153][154][155][194][195][196]198], whereas broadband vibrations, such as vehicle-induced vibrations, are generally described as weighted acceleration root mean square 𝑎 , , vibration dose value 𝑎 , [14] or Z-vibration level VLz [192], as expressed in Equations ( 5)- (7). Furthermore, when assessing the vibration comfort problems of floors and pedestrian bridges caused by humans, both natural frequency and peak acceleration are commonly employed [199]. For instance, the Chinese standard JGJ/T 441-2019 specifies that for the floor slabs in residential or office buildings primarily excited by walking loads, the first-order vertical self-vibration frequency should be over 3 Hz, and the limit of vertical peak acceleration is 0.05 m/s 2 [91].…”