A novel smartphone-based evaluation system of pedestrian-induced footbridge vibration comfort

Abstract

Pedestrian-induced vibration comfort is an important factor affecting the serviceability of footbridges. This article proposes a smartphone-based evaluation system for pedestrian-induced footbridge vibration comfort, and the evaluation system consists of a data acquisition subsystem, management center subsystem, and smartphone client. Four technical challenges in the application of the evaluation system are solved: coordinates transformation, acceleration signal drift correction, signal filtering, and computation of the total weighted root mean square acceleration. To verify the validity of the proposed evaluation system, field experiments are carried out on the Forth Corridor Footbridge in Guangzhou. A comparison of the proposed system and the traditional methodology shows that the total weighted root mean square acceleration errors between smartphones and accelerometers are less than ±5%. In addition, the subjective feelings in the field experiments are in excellent agreement with the corresponding stipulation in ISO 2631-1:1997 (Amendment 1. International Standardization Organization, Geneva, 2010).