The impact foot landing position (FLP) has on the simulation of medial-lateral pedestrian loading

Abstract

The issue of Medial-lateral loading from pedestrians has received increased attention from bridge designers and researchers since the London Millennium Bridge incidence 12 years ago where the bridge vibrated excessively in the lateral direction due to crossing pedestrians. Nonetheless, there is still a scarcity of reliable information on the magnitude and nature of this type of loading. The authors have carried out over 60 walking trials on 10 healthy adult participants walking with various different foot land positions and step widths (two parameters that are thought to influence medial-lateral loading) on a rigid walkway mounted with a force plate. Subject data, pertinent temporal-spatial parameters of gait, walking velocity and pacing frequency are presented for each participant. Additionally, the medial-lateral forces recorded during these tests are presented and analysed. A simplistic force function, developed in earlier trials on pedestrians walking at normal gait and speed is tested against these forces for robustness. Further, this force function is compared to the force function developed from these trial sets. Both functions are based on higher order harmonics and phase angles, hence comparison of both is relatively straight forward.