Prediction of ground-borne vibration from random traffic flow and road roughness: Theoretical model and experimental validation

Abstract

With the densification and closer distance to buildings of road traffic network in urban areas, the assessment and control of environmental vibrations becomes the focus of attention, in which the prediction of traffic flow-induced ground vibration is very critical. However, few studies have been reported on the theoretical prediction method of traffic flow-induced ground vibration from the perspective of stochastic theory. The present work contributes to the perfection and innovation of the current methodologies for the prediction of traffic flow-induced ground vibration. In this paper, a semi-analytical and semi-numerical method for predicting traffic flow induced ground vibrations is developed, in which the random effect generated from traffic flow and road roughness is considered by establishing the vehicle-road-soil coupling model. Aiming to predict the long-term vibration and transient vibration induced by road traffic flow, the average and the adverse velocity levels are used as the evaluation indicators. The effectiveness of the proposed method is validated by an on-site experiment, and the characteristics of ground vibrations are investigated in time and frequency domains, respectively. The results demonstrate that the proposed method can effectively predict the road traffic flow-induced ground vibrations, and the randomness of both traffic flow and road roughness cannot be neglected. For the experimental site, the main frequency band of ground vibrations concentrates on 7–25 Hz, and the predominant center frequency is 12.5 Hz, resulting from the resonance between the overlapping dominant frequency bands of the dynamic vehicle loads and the natural frequency of the soil.