Document Type

Theses, Ph.D

Rights

Available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike 4.0 International Licence

Publication Details

Thesis submitted to the National Unversity of Ireland, University College Dublin, School of Architecture, Landscape and Civil Engineering, for the award of Ph.D., achieved in 2005

Abstract

Many bridges of the world’s highway networks have been in service for decades and are subject to escalating volumes of traffic. Consequently, there is a growing need for the rehabilitation or replacement of bridges due to deterioration and increased loading. The assessment of the strength of the existing bridge is relatively well understood, whereas the traffic loading it is subject to, is not as well understood. Accurate assessment of the loading to which bridges may be subject, can result in significant savings for the highway maintenance budgets internationally. In recent years, a general approach has emerged in the research literature: the characteristics of the traffic at a site are measured and used to investigate the load effects to which the bridge may be subject in its remaining lifetime. This research has the broad objective of developing better methods of statistical analysis of highway bridge traffic loading. The work focuses on short- to medium-length (approximately 15 to 50 m), single- or two-span bridges with two opposing lanes of traffic. Dynamic interaction of the trucks on the bridge is generally not included. Intuitively, it can be accepted that the gap between successive trucks has important implications for the amount of load that may be applied to any given bridge length. This work describes, in quantitative terms, the implications for various bridge lengths and load effects. A new method of modelling headway for this critical time-frame is presented. When daily maximum load effects (for example) are considered as the basis for an extreme value statistical analysis of the simulation results, it is shown that although this data is independent, it is not identically distributed. Physically this is manifest as the difference in load effect between 2- and 3-truck crossing events. A method termed composite distribution statistics is presented which accounts for the different distributions of load effect caused by different event types. Exact equations are derived, as well as asymptotic expressions which facilitate the application of the method. Due to sampling variability, the estimate of lifetime load effect varies for each sample of load effect taken. In this work, the method of predictive likelihood is used to calculate the variability of the predicted extreme for a given sample. In this manner, sources of uncertainty can be taken into account and the resulting lifetime load effect is shown to be calculated with reasonable assurance. To calculate the total lifetime load effect static load effect plus that due to dynamic interaction), the results of dynamic simulations based on 10-years of static results are used in a multivariate extreme value analysis. This form of analysis allows for the inherent correlation between the total and static load effect that results from loading events. A distribution of dynamic amplification factor and estimates for a site dynamic allowance factor are made using parametric bootstrapping techniques. It is shown that the influence of dynamic interaction decreases with increasing static load effect.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.21427/D7XJ84

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