Abstract
Many studies in the literature have already evidenced that pedestrians are able to change the dynamic properties of slender structures (e.g., footbridges and staircases). The aim of this paper is to analyse which pedestrians’ features mostly affect the structure behaviour, in order to properly account for them in a human–structure interaction problem, while disregarding the less relevant ones. This is accomplished by measuring the apparent mass (i.e., the frequency response function between the vibration of the structure at the contact point and the consequent force exerted by the pedestrian to the structure itself) curves of human bodies and coupling them to the dynamics of a slender structure. In more detail, this paper aims at analysing which factors must be accounted for among intra-subject variability (i.e., the dynamic behaviour of the same subject can change because it is characterised by a natural dispersion), inter-subject variability (i.e., different subjects have different dynamic behaviours) and the posture (i.e., the same subject changes posture during motion and this causes a change of his/her dynamic features). The influence of the apparent mass properties on the modal parameters of the hosting structure is addressed by means of a modal approach.
Highlights
As for the frequency range, it was chosen to include the modes of the stud dynamic shaker was set to be a white noise profile with a root mean square (RMS) value of ied ms structure that are influenced by 3.5 theand
Even if a single subject is characterised by different. This was done since a lack of knowledge was found in the literature about the main factors damping intervals when changing the posture, the only systematic effect of the posture that drive the passive pedestrian contribution in the human–structure interaction (HSI) problem
To study the passive is related to the type of contact. It is contribution, the attention was focused on the following factors: the intra-subject variabilconfirmed that it is enough to perform few tests per subject with many subjects in either ity, the inter-subject variability and the posture of the body
Summary
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. There is no study that fully analyses the effects of the previous points and indicates which of them should be considered more than the others, but this aspect is important to develop a reliable and accurate HSI model For this reason, the present work aims at verifying which aspects have more influence on the passive pedestrian interaction. It is recalled that the aim of the HSI study is the assessment of the effect that people have on the characteristics of the host structure, and on its dynamic properties For this reason, the evaluation of the effects of the above-mentioned factors on the PGRF (see the numbered list discussed previously) is performed here by looking at the variations of the modal parameters (i.e., eigenfrequencies and non-dimensional damping ratios) of the structure.
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