Monitoring crowd load effect on typical ancient Tibetan building

Tibetan heritage building has attracted attention from many people who have interest in its historical and cultural value. Many of these buildings are opened to visitors in recent years, and the live load from tourist becomes a problem with increasing number of visitors. A monitoring system has been installed in a typical ancient Tibetan timber building to collect data on the material stresses and deformations of structural components. Based on the data collected, a strategy is proposed to evaluate the component of structural response induced by crowd load. A statistical relationship is obtained between the effective temperature change and the recorded strain increment. Results show that the measured strain is closely related to the number of visitors, and this may form the basis for a method to further evaluate the safety and integrity of the structure. An experiment was conducted on a corridor of the building with random pedestrian loading to validate the proposed strategy with encouraging results. Copyright (c) 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.