Comfort Assessment of Human-Induced Vibration of Pedestrian Bridges Based on Stevens Annoyance Rate Model

Abstract

In recent years, the continuous innovation in terms of using new materials and structures for pedestrian bridges has led to a significant reduction in the natural frequency of such bridges. Thus, the human-induced vibration comfort of bridges has been increasingly affected. Therefore, this paper introduces the Stevens annoyance rate model (ARM) and proposes a design and evaluation method for human-induced vibration comfort of pedestrian bridges based on this model. In order to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method, a practical pedestrian bridge is used as an example to perform dynamic analysis, comfort evaluation, and vibration reduction design. The results show that the pedestrian bridge comfort evaluation method based on the Stevens-ARM can accurately quantify the vibration comfort of the human body under uncertainties. For comfort control, the new comfort design method and a genetic algorithm (GA) can arrange multiple tuned mass dampers (MTMDs) more reasonably, which can prevent the annoyance rate (AR) and comfort rate under the two-way coupled vibration from exceeding the limit. Moreover, data obtained from 14 pedestrian bridges in China were analyzed to verify the generality and reliability of the findings.