Practical formula for determining peak acceleration of footbridge under walking considering human-structure interaction

In this paper, an analytical formulation is proposed to predict the vertical vibration response due to the pedestrian walking on a footbridge considering the human-structure interaction, where the footbridge and pedestrian are represented by the Euler beam and linear oscillator model, respectively. The derived coupled equation of motion is a nonlinear fourth-order partial differential equation. An uncoupled solution strategy based on the combined weighted residual and perturbation method) is proposed to reduce the tedious computation, which allows the separate integration between the bridge and pedestrian subsystems. The theoretical study demonstrates that the pedestrian subsystem can be treated as a structural system with added mass, damping, and stiffness. The analysis procedure is then applied to a case study under the conditions of single pedestrian and multi pedestrians, and the results are validated and compared numerically. For convenient vibration design of a footbridge, the simplified peak acceleration formula and the idea of decoupling problem are thus proposed.