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- An Analytical study
Dipankar Bhawal **
ABSTRACT
Pedestrian or foot-bridges are an integral part of infrastructures like roads, highways, railways etc. which has
evolved into aesthetically appealing flexible and slender structures with the use of high strength materials or due to
space and clearance constraints. These footbridges are often made to blend with the landscape and sometimes being
treated as landmarks also. Existing provisions of codes should be modified to take care of design or analysis of such
structures which are becoming more and more susceptible to the adverse effects caused by dynamic loadings
generated by the movement of pedestrians with different characteristics. This study will be concentrating on the
numerical investigation on the basis of a load model representative of a crowd of pedestrian walking across a typical
footbridge and thereafter be compared with the output due to static loading recommended by the existing code.
1. INTRODUCTION
Pedestrian footbridges can be designed to the passage in order to simplify the design
by applying static loads according to the norms process [2], [3]. To arrive at workable principles
available in the existing national codes. This and easy analytical solutions suitable models of
loading may not be sufficient to determine the pedestrian loads need to be formulated. These
actual behaviour and design of certain loadings are usually probabilistic in nature and
footbridges which has long spans or flexible dependent of demography, occupation, density
decks. There can be some situations when of the population and other factors in relation
critical dynamic loading may affect these type of with different regions. Therefore field researches
footbridges during their service stage, which can need to be conducted to collect samples of data
be in the form large permanent deflection, before valid load models could be created.
deformation, excessive vibrations causing The movement of a single, a group or a
discomfort to majority of the pedestrians at a crowd of pedestrians can be varying from
time or reduced service life of the superstructure walking state to running state. In addition a
etc. The collapse of the pedestrian bridges may group of people can be jumping , jogging away,
not be directly attributed to the dynamic actions laterally swaying, bobbing and even perform
on the bridge, however possibility of such vandal actions when passing through a
occurrences at ultimate stage cannot be ruled out footbridge. As the footbridges are little bit
for special footbridges. The choice of load controlled from the point of view of restriction
factors can be what is used for vehicular actions in width of the passage, a certain amount of
or as decided by committees. Practical approach correlation between density and speed of
should be targeted towards achieving an pedestrians can be established [3]. For
economy in design by varying the design loads footbridges close to zones with dense population
according to the need of the users during the where fairs, festivals and enormous meetings or
inception stage of the project. Therefore congregations are held, sudden erratic rush of
different types of footbridges should be crowds can be expected there with high
categorised into relevant groups according to the probability of recurrence. This study will be
volume or density of pedestrians having access carried out considering such a situation where a
Fig. 2 : Idealised model of pedestrians and beam element Fig. 3 : Normal distribution of pace-frequency
(random)