A new bridge-vehicle system part II: Parametric study

The formulation of a new bridge-vehicle system using shell with eccentric beam elements has been introduced in a companion paper (Part I). The new system takes into account of the contribution of the twisting and pitching modes of vehicles to the bridge responses. It can also be used to study the dynamic transverse load distribution of a bridge. This paper presents a parametric study on the impact induced by one vehicle or multi-vehicle running across a bridge using the proposed model. Several parameters were considered as variables including the mass ratio, the speed parameter, the frequency ratio and the axle spacing parameter to investigate their effects on the impact factor. A total number of 189<br />cases were carried out in this parametric study. Within the realistic range of vehicle considered, the maximum impact factors could be 2.24, 1.78 and 1.49 for bridges with spans 10 m, 20 m and 30 m respectively.