Abstract
With the rapid development of China's economy, many long-span bridges have been built and put into service. Vehicle load has been changing year by year in terms of the gross vehicle weight (GVW), the wheelbase and the traffic volume, especially the overload of heavy vehicles, which is a major challenge to the safety and durability of bridges. It is necessary to establish the vehicle load model through the measured traffic data for actual traffic conditions of the given bridge. In this study, the weigh-in-motion (WIM) data collected from an operational long-span urban highway bridge located in Wuhan, China, were used to analyze the statistical characteristics of vehicle loads. On the basis of the types of vehicles, (1) Considering the double or multimodal Gauss distribution characteristics of the GVW, the expectation maximization (EM) algorithm was used to estimate the statistical parameters of the Gauss distribution; (2) The generalized extreme value distribution (GEV) was used to develop the statistical model of the vehicle load extreme value; (3) The vehicle load extreme values in the design reference period of the urban highway bridge were estimated by the extreme value type I distribution; (4) According to the axle weight and the axle spacing, a statistical fatigue vehicle load model for the small and medium span urban highway bridges located in Wuhan, China was presented based on the Miner linear accumulated damage hypothesis and the effective fatigue damage principle.
Highlights
Vehicle load is one of the main factors affecting the safety and durability of a bridge
The WIM data collected from the Wuhan Junshan Yangtze Bridge was used to analyze the traffic condition, gross vehicle weight, vehicle axle weight
Results are listed as follows, (1) The vehicle types of Junshan Yangtze River Bridge are mainly composed of two-axle vehicles and six-axle vehicles, among which two-axle vehicles account for 68.6% and six-axle vehicles account for 19.5%
Summary
Vehicle load is one of the main factors affecting the safety and durability of a bridge. By simulating the construction of the corresponding random traffic flow and analyzing the vehicle load effect, some random characteristics parameters such as the impact of the vehicle lateral position are considered and established in the random models. Through analyzing the traffic flow, the vehicle types and the gross vehicle weight features, Chen et al (2014) established the equivalent vehicle models based on the equivalent damage theory, and developed a simplified fatigue vehicle model for the urban expressway bridges. In order to simulate the real traffic flow of the highway, many scholars have made plenty of research on the effect of vehicle load and established the corresponding vehicle load models. A statistical fatigue vehicle load model for the urban highway bridges is proposed based on the Miner linear accumulated damage hypothesis and the effective fatigue damage principle (Fisher and Roy, 2011), which are suitable for the fatigue analysis of the bridges
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