Lateral vibration of footbridges under crowd-loading: Continuous crowd modeling approach

TL;DR

This paper introduces a 1D continuous crowd model coupled with a footbridge dynamics model to analyze lateral vibrations caused by crowd-loading, providing a simplified yet effective approach for understanding pedestrian-structure interactions.

Contribution

It presents a novel continuous crowd-flow model integrated with footbridge dynamics, emphasizing synchronization effects and offering a new framework for crowd-structure vibration analysis.

Findings

Preliminary numerical simulations demonstrate the model's capability.

The model captures crowd synchronization effects.

Insights into crowd-induced vibrations on footbridges.

Abstract

In this paper, a simple 1D crowd model is proposed, which aim is to properly describe the crowd-flow phenomena occurring when pedestrians walk on a flexible footbridge. The crowd is assumed to behave like a continuous compressible fluid and the pedestrian flow is modeled in a 1-D framework using the (total) mass (of pedestrians) conservation equation. This crowd model is then coupled with a simple model for the dynamical behavior of the footbridge and an optimized modeling of synchronization effects is performed. Numerical simulations are presented to show some preliminary results.