Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

Several modern footbridges around the world have experienced large lateral vibrations during crowd loading events. The onset of large-amplitude bridge wobbling has generally been attributed to crowd synchrony; although, its role in the initiation of wobbling has been challenged. In this talk, we will discuss (i) the contribution of a single pedestrian into overall, possibly unsynchronized, crowd dynamics, and (ii) detailed, yet analytically tractable, models of crowd phase-locking. The pedestrian models can be used as "crash test dummies" when numerically probing a specific bridge design. This is particularly important because the U.S. code for designing pedestrian bridges does not contain explicit guidelines that account for the collective pedestrian behavior. This talk is based on two recent papers: Belykh et al., Science Advances, 3, e1701512 (2017) and Belykh et al., Chaos, 26, 116314 (2016).