Dynamic Analysis of Horizontally Curved Thin-Walled Box-Girder Bridge due to Moving Vehicle

The impact on curved box-girder bridges due to vehicle moving across rough bridge deck have been analyzed using bridge-vehicle coupled dynamics. The bridge deck unevenness has been assumed to be a homogeneous random process in space specified by a PSD function. The analysis incorporates the effect of centrifugal forces due to vehicle moving on curved bridge. The curved box-girder bridge has been numerically modeled using computationally efficient thin-walled box-beam finite elements which take into account the torsional warping, distortion and distortional warping, that are important features of thin-walled box girders. Rigid vehicle with longitudinal and transverse input to the wheels giving rise to heave-pitch-roll degrees of freedom has been considered. The theoretical bridge model used in simulation study has been validated by a free vibration experiment using impact excitation. The impact factors for several response parameters such as bending moment, shear force, torsional moment, torsional bi-moment, distortional moment, distortional bi-moment and vertical deflections have been obtained for various bridge-vehicle parameters. Both constant velocity and forward acceleration of the vehicle have been considered to examine impact factor. The results highlighted that the impact factors of a curved box girder bridge corresponding to torsion, distortion and their corresponding bimoments have been observed to be generally very high, while those of the other responses are also relatively higher than that of corresponding straight box girder bridge.

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