A feasible vibration measurement and active control method of reinforced concrete lightweight pier railway bridges for heavy-haul monorail trains

Abstract

This paper aims at introducing a novel method to control the lateral vibration of reinforced concrete, lightweight pier railway bridges (LPRBs) with heavy-haul (HH) monorail trains. For this purpose, a two-pier LPRB was strengthened using different techniques, and the dynamic performance of the reinforced bridge was evaluated for all the configurations. This paper compared the dynamic performance of LPRB increased by different plans. Meanwhile, a HH monorail train with two bogies was described by a three-dimension (3D) discrete rigid multi-body system with 23 degrees of freedoms (DOFs), while the two-pier LPRB was considered as an assemblage of beam elements with six DOFs at each node. Then, a finite element (FE) model train-bridge coupling system (TBCS) was set up based on the time-varying theory. After massive experimentally and numerically study, the dynamic analyses of the bridge and the running safety (RS) indexes of the train were conducted for each reinforcement plan using the program Dynamic Interaction Analysis for HH Train-Bridge System (DIAHHTBS). The results show that both the dynamic responses of the bridge and RS indices of the trains fulfilled the requirements in relevant specifications. It might mean that the proposed reinforcement method can strengthen the lateral stiffness of the bridge and reduce the amplitude of lateral vibration.