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Civil and Environmental Engineering

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2010

Bridge

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Full-Text Articles in Engineering

Importance Of The Tail In Truck Weight Modeling For Bridge Assessment, Eugene J. Obrien, Bernard Enright, Abraham Getachew Jan 2010

Importance Of The Tail In Truck Weight Modeling For Bridge Assessment, Eugene J. Obrien, Bernard Enright, Abraham Getachew

Articles

To predict characteristic extreme traffic load effects, simulations are sometimes performed of bridge loading events. To generalize the truck weight data, statistical distributions are fitted to histograms of weight measurements. This paper is based on extensive WIM measurements from two European sites and shows the sensitivity of the characteristic traffic load effects to the fitting process. A semi-parametric fitting procedure is proposed: direct use of the measured histogram where there are sufficient data for this to be reliable and parametric fitting to a statistical distribution in the tail region where there are less data. Calculated characteristic load effects are shown …


Characteristic Dynamic Increment For Extreme Traffic Loading Events On Short And Medium Span Highway Bridges, Eugene J. Obrien, Daniel Cantero, Bernard Enright, Arturo González Jan 2010

Characteristic Dynamic Increment For Extreme Traffic Loading Events On Short And Medium Span Highway Bridges, Eugene J. Obrien, Daniel Cantero, Bernard Enright, Arturo González

Articles

More accurate assessment of safety can prevent unnecessary repair or replacement of existing bridges which in turn can result in great cost savings at network level. The allowance for dynamics is a significant component of traffic loading in many bridges and is often unnecessarily conservative. Critical traffic loading scenarios are considered in this paper with a model that allows for vehicle-bridge interaction and takes into account the road surface condition. Characteristic dynamic allowance values are presented for the assessment of mid-span bending moment in a wide range of short to medium span bridges for bi-directional traffic.