Random Characteristics of Vehicle-Bridge System Vibration by an Optimized Pseudo Excitation Method

Abstract

The pseudo excitation method (PEM) is improved for its efficiency by incorporating the self-adaptive Gauss integration (SGI) technology as a new combining integration. The PEM can transform the random rail irregularities into some pseudo harmonic excitation, which is a mature approach to deal with the random excitation for vehicle–bridge systems. The SGI was used to distinguish the significant from the insignificant parts of an integral section for the random excitation frequency on the stochastic response of the system, thereby reducing the computational effort required for the random vibration analysis of the system. Also, the SGI can intelligently handle the recognized integral section, by subdividing the important sections into several necessary frequency points, making rough decomposition, and allowing the unimportant regions to be eliminated. Based on selected frequency points, the deterministic pseudo harmonic excitations were generated, and then the standard deviation (SD) of the time history for the system was calculated by the PEM. The vehicle subsystem was simulated as a 23-degree of freedom model, and the bridge subsystem as a three-dimensional finite element model. The time-varying power spectral density (PSD) plots of the system were presented. Besides, the cumulative distribution function (CDF) of the response was calculated using Poisson’s crossing assumption. The random characteristics for the vehicle–bridge vibrations for different speeds and rail irregularities were calculated.