• Journal of the Computational Structural Engineering Institute of Korea
• /
• v.24 no.1
• /
• pp.79-85
• /
• 2011

Bridge Weigh-in-Motion(BWIM) system calculates a travelling vehicle's weight without interruption of traffic flow by analyzing the signals that are acquired from various sensors installed in the bridge. BWIM system or data accumulated from the BWIM system can be utilized to development of updated live load model for highway bridge design, fatigue load model for estimation of remaining life of bridges, etc. Field test with moving trucks including various load cases should be performed to guarantee successful development of precise BWIM system. In this paper, a numerical simulation technique is adopted as an alternative or supplement to the vehicle traveling test that is indispensible but expensive in time and budget. The constructed numerical model is validated by comparison experimentally measured signal with numerically generated signal. Also vehicles with various dynamic characteristics and travelling conditions are considered in numerical simulation to investigate the variation of bridge responses. Considered parameters in the numerical study are vehicle velocity, natural frequency of the vehicle, height of entry bump, and lateral position of the vehicle. By analyzing the results, it is revealed that the lateral position and natural frequency of the vehicle should be considered to increase precision of developing BWIM system. Since generation of vehicle travelling signal by the numerical simulation technique costs much less than field test, a large number of test parameters can effectively be considered to validate the developed BWIM algorithm. Also, when artificial neural network technique is applied, voluminous data set required for training and testing of the neural network can be prepared by numerical generation. Consequently, proposed numerical simulation technique may contribute to improve precision and performance of BWIM systems.