Abstract—Pedestrian loads that may cause excessive structural vibration involve some uncertain parameters such as walking frequency, step length, dynamic load factors and phases of harmonic components, which will lead to uncertainties of structural response and this issue need to be solved by probabilistic analysis. Considering that the traditional Monte Carlo simulation method for reliability analysis has rather low efficiency, an approach based on uniform design and response surface method for calculating the probabilistic structural response induced by pedestrian vertical loads is proposed to improve the efficiency of structural dynamic analysis with uncertainties. A few representative samples of time history of pedestrian loads are simulated using uniform design first, and then the corresponding peak acceleration response spectra are obtained by dynamic analysis on beam structures with different spans and damping ratios. The spectra which have a certain percentile are obtained by reliability analysis based on response surface method. Then the general formulae of peak acceleration response spectra, which can be used to calculate structural peak accelerations directly, are deduced from parametric analysis of damping ratio and span. Monte Carlo simulation is conducted to validate the precision of this method. The case study shows that compare to the results calculated by the proposed method, the formulae in two widely-used codes such as BS 5400-2:2006, overestimate the peak acceleration of structure with high frequency remarkably and it should be cautious when using them to obtain structural responses.

Index Terms—Random pedestrian loads, Uniform design, Response spectrum, Peak acceleration

Cite: Song Jie, K. T. Tse, Song Zhigang, and Zhao Hongjiao, "Analysis of Probabilistic Peak Acceleration Response for Random Pedestrian Loads," International Journal of Structural and Civil Engineering Research, Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 1-23, November 2012.