Lateral Vibrations of a Cable-Stayed Bridge under Crowd Excitation

A cable-stayed bridge model under crowd excitation is established in this paper by considering the geometric nonlinear property of the cables. Lateral vibrations of the model are investigated by employing the center manifold theory, and the first-order approximation solution of the periodic vibration of the bridge is derived by using the energy method. Numerical simulations are carried out to verify the validity of our analytical expressions. Our research shows that the existence of the cables can reduce the amplitude and frequency of the bridge, especially for the large amplitude case. This might explain why measured data of a cable-stayed bridge (T-bridge in Japan) vibrating under crowd excitation are much less than the theoretical results reported in previous studies in which the cable-stayed bridge is viewed as a single-degree-of-freedom system. Our analysis results suggest that the structure types of footbridges should not be easily ignored in the study of pedestrian-footbridge interaction.