Duhamel method + Crowd-induced bridge vibration [COMING SOON]

Hi folks,

Just a quick update to give you a look at what I’ll be releasing next; the Duhamel Method Python Project.

I decided to tag on an interesting application to the end of the project - crowd loading! So, after we finish explaining and writing a function to perform our Duhamel integration for calculating structural response we’ll be using it to simulate crowd-induced loading of a simple bridge/beam model.

The video in this post is a snapshot of the output simulation we’ll produce in the project. It shows a top-down view of the bridge deck with pedestrians walking from one side to the other. Individual pedestrian pacing frequency can be inferred from the bottom plot. The bottom plot also shows the (scaled) vertical dynamic response of the bridge.

This is a nice little project that generalises to any structure (in particular floor slabs) provided you know the modal frequencies and mode shapes (which of course we discussed in the most recent course).

I’ve just wrapped up all the code so now need to record the video lectures, publish a summary article to the site and the full breakdown on Labs. So, probably another week or so before we’re live .

Once this one is live, it’ll be time to get going on the next course - more on that to follow.

Speak soon,
Seán