Field Investigations On the Lateral Vibration Features Of Prestressed Concrete Stress Ribbon Footbridges

The prestressed concrete (PC) stress ribbon footbridge is a type of suspension bridge without towers, which has been applied in Japan and all over the world for years in light of its low construction cost and aesthetic merit. It generally consists of the precast concrete slabs with embedded cables. However, the walking-induced lateral vibration trouble of the Millennium Bridge in London in 2000 gave a lesson to the engineers that the lateral vibration feature must be taken into consideration for the footbridge vibration evaluation. In this sense, the field investigations on the lateral vibration features of 14 pre-stressed concrete stress ribbon footbridge in Japan was carried out by artificial impact and damping free vibration tests. According to the investigations, the larger the bridge span, the lower the frequencies of lateral-related vibration modes. In addition, based on the damping-free vibration field tests, there was a tendency toward the damping constant degradation when bridge span became larger.