Predicting the effect of walking traffic on structural vibrations is a great challenge to designers of pedestrian structures, such as footbridges and floors.
They also wittily yet tenderly isolate pedestrian structures as the cultural artifacts and often odd, sculptural entities that they were.
This work proposes a design methodology for multi-input multi-output vibration control of pedestrian structures to simultaneously obtain the sensor/actuator placement and the control law.
In particular, several recent field trials have shown that this technique has the potential to be effective for the cancellation of human-induced vibrations in pedestrian structures.
The increasing number of reported vibration serviceability problems in newly built pedestrian structures, such as footbridges and floors, under walking load has attracted considerable attention in the civil engineering community over the past two decades.
This model is both stochastic and narrow-band, which are the two essential features of walking loading not addressed adequately in the existing design guidelines for pedestrian structures, such as footbridges, long-span floors and staircases.
Since these important aspects of walking forces have not been adequately researched in the past, the corresponding lack of knowledge has reflected badly on the quality of their mathematical models used in vibration assessments of pedestrian structures such as footbridges, staircases and floors.
In lightweight structures, there is increasing evidence of the existence of interaction between pedestrians and structures, now commonly termed pedestrian-structure interaction.
Knowledge of pedestrian-structure interaction effects is currently limited, and it is often quoted as a reason for our inability to predict vibration response accurately.
While tennis and bowling are pedestrian in structure, throughout there are enough ideas and novelties to keep things appealing.
