Dynamic Behavior of Damaged Bridge with Multi-Cracks Under Moving Vehicular Loads

When studying the vibration of a bridge–vehicle coupled system, most researchers mainly focus on the intact or original bridge structures. Nonetheless, a large number of bridges were built long ago, and most of them have suffered serious deterioration or damage due to the increasing traffic loads, environmental effect, material aging, and inadequate maintenance. Therefore, the effect of damage of bridges, such as cracks, on the vibration of vehicle–bridge coupled system should be studied. The objective of this study is to develop a new method for considering the effect of cracks and road surface roughness on the bridge response. Two vehicle models were introduced: a single-degree-of-freedom (SDOF) vehicle model and a full-scale vehicle model with seven degrees of freedom (DOFs). Three typical bridges were investigated herein, namely, a single-span uniform beam, a three-span stepped beam, and a non-uniform three-span continuous bridge. The massless rotational spring was adopted to describe the local flexibility induced by a crack on the bridge. The coupled equations for the bridge and vehicle were established by combining the equations of motion for both the bridge and vehicles using the displacement relationship and interaction force relationship at the contact points. The numerical results show that the proposed method can rationally simulate the vibrations of the bridge with cracks under moving vehicular loads.