ASSESSMENT OF THE DYNAMIC STRUCTURAL RESPONSE OF HIGHWAY BRIDGES BASED ON A PROGRESSIVE PAVEMENT DETERIORATION MODEL

Resumo

Highway bridges are usually subjected to random dynamic actions of variable magnitude
due to vehicles convoys crossing on the bridge pavement deck along their service life. These dynamic
actions can generate the nucleation of fractures or even their propagation on the bridge deck structure.
The deteriorated road surface condition of the asphalt pavement represents a key issue to the
significant increase of the displacements and stresses values on the highway bridge decks. Therefore,
this investigation aims to develop an analysis methodology, in order to evaluate the displacements and
stresses values of a steel-concrete composite highway bridge, including the dynamic actions due to
vehicles convoy and the effect of the progressive deterioration of the pavement surface, considering
the road surface damages. This way, the investigated steel-concrete highway bridge is constituted by
four longitudinal composite girders and a concrete deck, spanning 40m. In this investigation, the
developed computational model adopted the usual mesh refinement techniques present in finite
element method simulations implemented in the ANSYS computational program. The main
conclusions of this study focused on alerting structural engineers to the possible distortions, associated
to the steel-concrete composite bridge dynamic structural response when subjected to vehicles
dynamic actions.