Abstract
Through their biomechanical properties, pedestrians interact with the structures they occupy. Although this interaction has been recognized by researchers, pedestrians’ biomechanical properties have not been fully addressed. In this paper, a spring-mass-damper (SMD) system, with a pair of biomechanical forces, was used to model a pedestrian for application in vertical human–structure interaction (HSI). Tests were undertaken in a gait laboratory, where a three-dimensional motion-capture system was used to record a pedestrian’s walking motions at various frequencies. The motion-capture system produced the pedestrian’s center of mass (COM) trajectories from the captured motion markers. The vertical COM trajectory was approximated to be the pedestrian SMD dynamic responses under the excitation of biomechanical forces. SMD model parameters of a pedestrian for a specific walking frequency were estimated from a known walking frequency and the pedestrian’s weight, assuming that pedestrians always walk in displacement resonance and retain a constant damping ratio of 0.3. Thus, biomechanical forces were extracted using the measured SMD dynamic responses and the estimated SMD parameters. Extracted biomechanical forces from all test trials were expressed with third-order Fourier series. It was found that the amplitude of the first-order biomechanical forces changed with the pacing frequency and that it fit a linear model. Amplitudes of the second- and third-order biomechanical forces were found to be scattered and not closely related to walking frequency. A generalized extreme value distribution was fit to each of the amplitudes. Phases in the model for biomechanical forces were not related to pacing frequency, and a mean value of the phases is proposed.
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Acknowledgments
The authors gratefully acknowledge the joint financial support provided by the Ministry of Science and Technology of China (Grant SLDRCE14-B-16) and the National Science Foundation of China (51178338 and 51478346). The authors also acknowledge their colleagues, Yixin Peng and Ling Wang, who organized the protocol administration and supervised all volunteer participants.
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Information & Authors
Information
Published In
Journal of Bridge Engineering
Volume 21 • Issue 8 • August 2016
Copyright
© 2016 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Mar 3, 2015
Accepted: Jan 8, 2016
Published online: Mar 2, 2016
Published in print: Aug 1, 2016
Discussion open until: Aug 2, 2016
ASCE Technical Topics:
- Continuum mechanics
- Dynamic response
- Dynamics (solid mechanics)
- Engineering fundamentals
- Engineering mechanics
- Excitation (physics)
- Highway transportation
- Infrastructure
- Mathematics
- Models (by type)
- Motion (dynamics)
- Parameters (statistics)
- Pedestrians and cyclists
- Solid mechanics
- Statistics
- Structural behavior
- Structural engineering
- Structural models
- Traffic engineering
- Transportation engineering
- Vehicles
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