Dynamic Behaviour of Road Bridge Deck When a Truck Moves Along the Irregularities of the Road Profiles

Abstract

Bridge is the structure that is seen several dynamic loads unlike other structures. Ministry of Road Transport and Highways (MORTH) said that 10,876 people were killed due to potholes in the year 2015, which denotes the lack of proper maintenance of road pavements. When a vehicle moves along these surface irregularities, it not only causes uncomfortable to the passenger but also causes dynamic loads on the components like deck slab, bearings. Since the road surface irregularities like unevenness, potholes, etc., are unavoidable, we should understand the dynamic effect on the structure due to such undulations. IRC-6, standard to find the loads and load combinations on the road bridges, doesn’t talk about the dynamic load induced by surface irregularities with respect to the different classes of road profile as per ISO: 8608. On the other hand, IRC-6 only gives provisions of static analysis in the case of the vertical dynamic effect produced by moving vehicles. This study aims to generate road profiles having different degrees of unevenness as per ISO: 8608 and to propose a conservative method to find the vertical dynamic load on the bridge deck and its vertical response. A bridge deck is modeled as a Single Degree of Freedom system and the vertical dynamic responses of the bridge deck are found by Newmark’s Beta Linear Acceleration Method. It is found that the dynamic response, almost doubles when road profile quality changes from one class to the very next class. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.