• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.15 no.1
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• pp.21-38
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• 2003

The formulation of a new bridge-vehicle system using shell with eccentric beam elements has been introduced in a companion paper (Part I). The new system takes into account of the contribution of the twisting and pitching modes of vehicles to the bridge responses. It can also be used to study the dynamic transverse load distribution of a bridge. This paper presents a parametric study on the impact induced by one vehicle or multi-vehicle running across a bridge using the proposed model. Several parameters were considered as variables including the mass ratio, the speed parameter, the frequency ratio and the axle spacing parameter to investigate their effects on the impact factor. A total number of 189 cases were carried out in this parametric study. Within the realistic range of vehicle considered, the maximum impact factors could be 2.24, 1.78 and 1.49 for bridges with spans 10 m, 20 m and 30 m respectively.

• Structural Monitoring and Maintenance
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• v.9 no.1
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• pp.43-57
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• 2022

One of the instances which demand structural engineer's greatest attention and upgradation is the changing live load requirement in bridge design code. The challenge increases in developing countries as the pace of infrastructural growth is being catered by the respective country codes with bigger and heavier vehicles to be considered in the design. This paper presents the case study of India where Indian Roads Congress (IRC) codes in its revised version from 2014 to 2017 introduced massive Special vehicle (SV) around 40 m long and weighing 3850 kN to be considered in the design of road bridges. The code does not specify the minimum distance between successive special vehicles unlike other loading classes and hence the consequences of it form the motivation for this study. The effect of SV in comparison with Class 70R, Class AA, Class A, and Class B loading is studied based on the maximum bending moment with moving load applied in Autodesk Robot Structural Analysis. The spans considered in the analysis varied from 10 m to 1991 m corresponding to the span of Akashi Kaikyo Bridge (longest bridge span in the world). A total of 182 analyses for 7 types of vehicles (class B, class A, class 70R tracked, class 70R wheeled, class AA tracked, AA wheeled, and Special vehicle) on 26 different span lengths is carried out. The span corresponding to other vehicles which would equal the bending moment of a single SV is presented along with a comparison relative to Standard Uniformly Distributed Load. Further, the results are presented by introducing a new parameter named Intensity Factor which is proven to relate the effect of axle spacing of vehicle on the normalized bending moment developed.