Evaluation of Design Guidelines for the Serviceability Assessment of Aluminum Pedestrian Bridges
Publication: Journal of Bridge Engineering
Volume 22, Issue 1
Abstract
Serviceability issues related to lightweight pedestrian bridges have attracted a great deal of attention in the literature since the London Millennium Bridge incident, which involved large amplitude motions during its inauguration. Various design recommendations have since been proposed to quantify the steady-state resonant response and to mitigate excessive levels of vibration in slender pedestrian bridges. In the current study, design provisions currently used in North America and Europe are evaluated. Two full-scale aluminum pedestrian bridges were tested in the laboratory, and their performance in terms of meeting serviceability limits under pedestrian walking loads was assessed in accordance with a number of guidelines and standards. The experiments involved walking tests under different pedestrian densities. The results show significant differences in the predicted responses, which are mainly attributable to differences in the DLFs adopted in the guidelines, lack of guidance on the appropriate walking speeds in crowd loading conditions, and the factor scaling the individual pedestrian load to multiple pedestrians. The results after applying the guidelines were found unconservative in the lateral direction. The simulated results showed sensitivity to changes in the natural frequency due to the added mass of pedestrians, which becomes especially important in lightweight bridges. Recommendations to address these issues and to reconcile the differences between the various guidelines and standards and with measurements, based on results already available in the literature, are proposed.
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Acknowledgments
The authors are grateful for the financial support provided by the Natural Sciences Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) through the Collaborative Research Grants program. Industry contributions were provided by the Aluminum Association of Canada and MAADI Group and are gratefully acknowledged by the authors. The authors would like to thank all the volunteers involved in the numerous walking tests conducted during the course of this research study.
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Information & Authors
Information
Published In
Journal of Bridge Engineering
Volume 22 • Issue 1 • January 2017
Copyright
© 2016 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Jan 19, 2016
Accepted: Jun 28, 2016
Published online: Sep 12, 2016
Published in print: Jan 1, 2017
Discussion open until: Feb 12, 2017
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