Journal of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Dynamic Analysis of Multi-Span Bridges under Moving Wheel Loads

Abstract

Sumit Guha and Somenath Mukherjee*

This work is aimed at presenting response studies for the dynamic analysis of various types of RC bridges. The emphasis is to provide an evaluation of the ‘impact factor’, which is often used to incorporate the dynamic effects in conventional analyses of bridges. After interpreting the results from numerical formulation with theoretical results, a detailed parametric study is performed in this work to investigate some important details of the behavior of Deck Girder, Balanced Cantilever and Continuous Bridges based on dynamic analysis under the moving loads. Various aspects of the dynamic response of RC bridges are studied, comparing with the conventional static structural analysis and changing the vehicular velocity, damping ratio and number of spans. The resulting effects on bridge deflection, bending moment and shear are observed.