Utilising an advanced technology of people tracking in vibration serviceability application

Abstract

There is a continuous development in the facilities used for experimental measurements of human-induced vibrations due to walking of people in real-life structures. These facilities can be classified into three categories: 1. systems used to measure walking forces, 2. systems used to measure structural dynamic properties and vibration responses and 3. equipment required to locate the position of people within the structure. In recent years, state-of-the-art technologies have enabled both direct and indirect measurement of walking forces and vibration responses with improved accuracy. However, determining people’s position on the structure they occupy and dynamically excite is still a challenge, despite its importance. This is due to the limitations and lack of accuracy of existing systems used for this purpose. This paper presents an advanced system based on the Ultra-WideBand (UWB) technology to track the position of multiple people within civil engineering structures. It is demonstrated that this system has the capability of providing measurements of people’s positions in real-time, with around 50 cm accuracy, using wearable compact tags. In addition to the accuracy, the simple setting up and capability to track people’s positions in different types of structures are advantages over other types of body location tracking systems. Incorporating the above mentioned systems to measure simultaneously walking-induced forces, realistic time-varying locations of these forces and the corresponding time-varying vibration responses has created an unprecedented opportunity to boost considerably research pertinent to human-induced vibration. This will be based on invaluable but, until now, difficult to conduct real-life simultaneous measurements of these three key time-varying walkingforce parameters.