We study the synchronization of the pedestrians motion with the lateral motion of slender footbridges, which attracted the attention of researchers mainly after the Millennium Bridge well known event. We consider a bridge-pedestrians model developed by Strogatz et al. To better understand some aspects of the underlying mechanical phenomena and to increase the agreement of the model results to the effective behaviour of the walkers (as observed during the Millennium Bridge’s opening day and during Arup’s tests on site) we have introduced some modifications to the model and we have performed extensive parametric investigations, supported by many numerical simulations. Our approach is therefore computational, by means of a self-made code. This permits to highlight the parameters which mainly affect the trigger and the development of the phenomenon of synchronous lateral excitation, thus allowing a good understanding of the physical event and an evaluation of the engineering reliability of the Strogatz et al. model.
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