Performance Evaluation of Existing Bridges under Vehicle Dynamic Effects

This paper summarizes the recent work by the first author’s research group related to the performance evaluation of existing bridges under vehicle dynamic effects. Based on the data from short-term monitoring of existing bridges, a framework to estimate the extreme structure responses from the live load in a mean recurrence interval is developed in the first part. The Gumbel distribution of the extreme values was derived from an extreme value theory and Monte Carlo Simulation. In the second part, a framework of fatigue damage and reliability assessment for existing bridges is presented to include the effects of the progressively deteriorated road conditions and random dynamic vehicle loads in bridge’s life cycle. The random effects of vehicle speed and type, road profiles, and stress ranges are included. Studies have shown that the vehicle-induced dynamic allowance IM value prescribed by the AASHTO LRFD code may be underestimated under poor road surface conditions (RSCs) of some existing bridges. In addition, multiple dynamic stress ranges induced by vehicles cannot be included in the maximum displacement-based dynamic allowance IM values. In the third part of this paper, the reliability indices of a selected group of prestressed concrete girder bridges are calculated by modeling the IM explicitly as a random variable for different RSCs. Nevertheless, a reliability based dynamic amplification factor on stress ranges (DAFS) for fatigue design is proposed to include the fatigue damages from multiple stress range cycles due to each vehicle passage at varied vehicle speeds under various road conditions in the bridge’s life cycle.