Dynamic analysis of highway bridges considering a progressive pavement deterioration model

Resumo

Highway bridges are subjected to random traffic loads along their lifecycle and also subjected to
relevant impact dynamic loadings. The road-roughness of asphalt pavements represents a key issue to the
significant increase of the displacement and stress values on the highway bridge decks. Considering this fact, the
aim of this research work is to develop an analysis methodology to evaluate the displacement and stress values
of a steel-concrete composite highway bridge, including the dynamic actions due to vehicles convoy and also the
effect of the progressive deterioration of the pavement, taking into account the road surface damages. The
analyzed structural model corresponds to a typical steel-concrete composite highway bridge deck, with straight
axis, simple supported and spanning 13.0m by 40.0m. In this investigation, the numerical model developed for
the dynamic analysis of the steel-concrete composite bridge, adopted the usual mesh refinement techniques
present in Finite Element Method (FEM) simulations implemented in the ANSYS computational program. The
main conclusions of this study focused on alerting structural engineers to the significant distortions associated to
the bridge dynamic structural response, when subjected to dynamic actions produced by vehicles convoys on the
irregular pavement surface.