Structural Vibration Analysis under Fuzzy Excitations Due to Passing Heavy Vehicles

Abstract

This paper presents a new method to predict the dynamic response of buildings due to passing heavy vehicles in the context of multi-source fuzzy dynamic finite element analysis. The uncertain parameters considered as fuzzy variables include structural mass, stiffness, damping matrix and magnitude of excitation applied at the ground or base level. The implementation of the proposed method consists of the following steps: 1) acquisition of the ground acceleration data through in-situ measurements, 2) analysis of the one-third octave band power spectrum density of the measured data, 3) construction of the fuzzy source membership functions of favorite center frequencies of the one-third octave band, 4) construction of the fuzzy dynamic finite element model of the building structure, 5) analysis of the fuzzy membership function of model responses, and 6) calculation of the overall weighted root-mean-square acceleration in α-sublevel of fuzzy number by ISO2631 standards, from which the effect of ground excitation on building response is assessed. A case study is provided to demonstrate the evaluation of the fuzzy dynamic characteristics and frequency response function in terms of multi-source fuzzy numbers.