Dynamic Reliability Analysis of Large-Span Structures under Crowd Bouncing Excitation

Abstract

Bouncing is one of the most common human crowd activities on civil infrastructures such as sports stadiums and concert halls, where the audience tends to make their bodies jump up and down to celebrate or participate in sport and musical events. Dynamic loads are thus generated and exerted on the structures, giving unpleasant structural vibration, which may affect the functionality of the structure or even lead to a panic of the crowd. Although researchers have studied human-induced vibration from many perspectives including load models, calculation methods, criteria for serviceability evaluation, etc., there has been minimal work regarding crowd-induced reliability analysis, mainly because the stochastic feature of the crowd load as well as the mechanism describing the crowd–structure interaction is still not clear. In this paper, a framework to calculate crowd-induced structural vibration that considers the crowd–structure interaction effect is proposed and is validated through an experimental test. The dynamic parameters of the bouncing person in the crowd are adopted from a previous statistical study. The feasibility of a probability density evolution method (PDEM) is proved to be effective to calculate structural stochastic vibration under the bouncing crowd. The dynamic reliability of the structure is thus analyzed based on the stochastic responses. Results show that the consideration of the crowd–structure interaction effect significantly affects the dynamic reliability, which is also dependent on various factors including bouncing frequency, failure criteria, limit threshold, human model parameter distribution, etc. This paper provides a foundation for the performance-based vibration serviceability design of large-span structures.

Human-Induced Vibration Serviceability: From Dynamic Load Measurement towards the Performance-Based Structural Design

“…The reliability of a 30-m span and a 0.85-Hz lateral fundamental frequency was evaluated and discussed. In 2022, Zeng et al used PDEM to build up the framework for analyzing the dynamic reliability of large-span structures under crowd excitation from the perspective of vibration serviceability [87].…”

A design-oriented method for response prediction of light-weight timber floors under bouncing excitation

“…It has been well recognized that structures with low or high fundamental frequencies behave differently under human-induced load. Figure 1(a) shows the acceleration responses measured on a concrete floor (fundamental frequency: 3.52 Hz) under 1.75 bouncing excitation (Zeng et al, 2022). The responses are found to be near-resonant, indicating that the response is mainly dominated by the one of the harmonics of the excitation.…”

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

“…In recent years, with the continuous improvement of the strength of building materials and the requirements for architectural aesthetics, structures such as building floors and footbridges have been evolving towards lightweight, high-strength, long-span, and flexible designs [1][2][3][4]. Such structures exhibit low fundamental frequencies and limited damping, consequently raising concerns regarding vibration serviceability during crowd walking [5].…”