Evaluation and assessment of vibrations owing to human activity

Annoying levels of vibration on long-cantilevered structures owing to crowd movements during musical concerts, sporting events, aerobics exercises and so on, have become more common in recent years. There are still a number of issues related to excessive floor vibrations owing to human activities that need to be addressed such as: guidelines for more accurate analytical representation of structural parameters to predict floor dynamic response, better definition of forcing functions to simulate human activities in a computer model and finally more consistent methods of evaluation and assessment of vibrations. This paper focuses on the requirements and guidelines for the evaluation and assessment of vibrations as related to acceptability for human exposure. It briefly reviews the provision of several current standards and design guides for the evaluation and assessment of building vibrations owing to human rhythmic activities. Using the measured vibrations generated by crowd activities on a large cantilevered structure during several rock concerts, collected by way of a remote vibration monitoring system, this paper compares these provisions with each other and draws conclusions on their applicability. New relationships between the current vibration evaluation parameters along with guidance for the assessment of human exposure to vibration owing to rhythmic activities are proposed.