Implementation of damped bipedal inverted pendulum model of pedestrian into FE environment for prediction of vertical structural vibration

Motivated by the limited availability of tools for vibration serviceability assessment of civil engineering structures under pedestrian excitation in finite element (FE) environment, this study proposes a strategy for transferring a damped bipedal inverted pendulum (DBIP) model for a pedestrian from the analytical to the numerical domain. The strategy is implemented in FE-software ANSYS to addresses the key challenge of pedestrian alternating between the left and right stance leg. This is achieved by using COMBIN14 element in conjunction with employing element birth and death techniques to model temporary nature of the foot-structure contact. The implementation in FE environment has been verified against the analytical results of the DBIP model. The proposed method successfully transfers the pedestrian load modelling approach from biomechanics to FE modelling environment typical of civil engineering projects enabling efficient vibration serviceability assessment.