Assessment of the Lateral Vibration Serviceability Limit State of Slender Footbridges Including the Postlock-in Behaviour

The lateral vibration serviceability of slender footbridges has been the subject of many studies over the last few decades. However, in spite of the large amount of research, a common criterion has not been set yet. Although the human–structure interaction phenomenon is widely accepted as the main cause of the sudden onset of high amplitudes of vibration, the current design recommendations do not include an expression for the auto-induced component of the pedestrian action and, as a consequence, it is not possible to evaluate the footbridge comfort once the lock-in effect has developed. Hence, the purpose of this paper is to propose a general formulation, which allows the analysis of the different load scenarios that the footbridge will experience during its overall life cycle. An important advantage over most current design guidelines is that the procedure permits the evaluation of the comfort level of the footbridge, even with crowd densities above the “critical number”, and thus takes informed decisions about the possible use of external devices to control the vibration response, depending on the probability of occurrence of the problem. The performance of the proposed method is successfully evaluated through numerical response simulations of two real footbridges, showing a good agreement with the experimental data.