Abstract Summary
In the past massive earthquakes, many people suffered severe damage. Among them, not a few people were injured as a result of evacuation actions during the shaking. Therefore, it is important to estimate the human response to shaking and the possibility of evacuation behav-ior in order to evaluate human injury during an earthquake. Considering the background men-tioned above, this study proposes the evaluation method of fall and walking difficulty in earthquake considering behavior of human by constructing the seismic response analysis model of human body. First, the shaking table tests with human subject were conducted to observe the behavior of a human during strong motion. Then the human body model considering walking and falling was de-veloped based on a cart-type double inverted pendulum with feedback control system. In order to set appropriate feedback gains of the control system, the displacement and velocity of head of the human body model was compared to that of the human subject in the shaking table test. Then, the behavior and mechanism of falling of the human due to walking during shaking was investigated by inputting the strong motion record, which observed during 1995 Hyogo-ken Nanbu earthquake, to the human body model. Next, sinusoidal waves of various amplitudes and periods were input to the human body model to clarify the relationship between the vibration characteristics of the input wave and the response of the human body. The period of the sinusoidal wave was varied from 0.26 to 3.3 seconds. The peak floor velocity ranged from 0.5 m/s to 2.0 m/s. The high limit of the peak floor acceleration was 20 m/s2, and the peak floor displacement was 0.5 m. The human body model was made to walk 25 m while exposed to shaking, and its behavior was analyzed. As a result, the human body model fell when the period of the sinusoidal wave was 0.5 to 1 second and the peak response velocity was 1.5 m/s. When the period of the input wave was 0.45 seconds or less, the human model walked without much disturbance. On the other hand, in the periodic band of 1 second or longer, the human model tended to be more disturbed with longer periods, even when the maximum velocity was small. Finally, the validity of evaluation method for evacuation possibility during an earthquake is in-vestigated by comparing the behavior of the human body excited by sinusoidal wave with that excited by an earthquake shaking.
