Analysis of the dynamic characteristics of the coupled system of footbridge and human

In the past, the human-induced loads were always treated as static loads when study the vibration of footbridge. Actually, human is an active object and there is an interaction relation between the human and footbridge, i.e., human and footbridge form a coupled system. The activities of human would influence the dynamic characteristic of the coupled system. In this paper, a realistic footbridge is measured and identified the changing dynamic characteristics during a mass event with a time-domain approach, which is verified using a theoretical test case and a laboratory test. This approach is applied to the observations during the mass event and first results are presented demonstrating the potential power of the approach.