• Earthquakes and Structures
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• 제18권1호
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• pp.1-14
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• 2020

The vehicle-bridge interaction (VBI) analysis might be cumbersome and computationally expensive in bridge engineering due to the necessity of solving large number of coupled system of equations. However, VBI analysis can provide valuable insights into the dynamic behavior of highway bridges under specific loading conditions. Hence, this paper presents a numerical study on the dynamic behavior of a conventional highway bridge under strong near-field and far-field earthquake motions considering the VBI effects. A recursive substructuring method, which enables solving bridge and vehicle equations of motion separately and suitable to be adapted to general purpose finite element softwares, was used. A thorough analysis that provides valuable information about the effect of various traffic conditions, vehicle velocity, road roughness and effect of soil conditions under far-field and near-field strong earthquake motions has been presented. A real-life concrete highway bridge was chosen for numerical demonstrations. In addition, sprung mass models of vehicles consist of conventional truck and car models were created using physical and dynamic properties adopted from literature. Various scenarios, of which the results may help to highlight the different aspects of the dynamic response of concrete highway bridges under strong earthquakes, have been considered.

• Advances in Computational Design
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• 제4권3호
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• pp.307-326
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• 2019

A low computational cost semi-analytical method is developed, based on eigenfunction expansion, to study the vibration of rectangular plates subjected to a series of moving sprung masses, representing a bridge deck under multiple vehicle or train moving loads. The dynamic effects of the suspension system are taken into account by using flexible connections between the moving masses and the base structure. The accuracy of the proposed method in predicting the dynamic response of a rectangular plate subjected to a series of moving sprung masses is demonstrated compared to the conventional rigid moving mass models. It is shown that the proposed method can considerably improve the computational efficiency of the conventional methods by eliminating a large number of time-varying components in the coupled Ordinary Differential Equations (ODEs) matrices. The dynamic behaviour of the system is then investigated by performing a comprehensive parametric study on the Dynamic Amplification Factor (DAF) of the moving loads using different design parameters. The results indicate that ignoring the flexibility of the suspension system in both moving force and moving mass models may lead to substantially underestimated DAF predictions and therefore unsafe design solutions. This highlights the significance of taking into account the stiffness of the suspension system for accurate estimation of the plate maximum dynamic response in practical applications.