Numerical investigation of a steel arch bridge and interaction with high-speed trains

Abstract This paper studies the vibration characteristics of a three-dimensional (3D) arch bridge when high-speed trains pass it. An accurate representation of the moving wheel element was developed; therefore, two elements for modeling a simple beam can obtain accurate results. In the dynamic analysis, this study advises two simple criteria to predict the train-bridge resonance effect. The first criterion is that the dominated train frequencies of nVtrain/Ltrain similar to the first several bridge natural frequencies will produce resonance, where Vtrain is the train velocity, Ltrain is the compartment length and n is a positive integer. The second criterion is that the resonance will be produced when the train velocity is higher than 0.5Lf2, where L is the bridge length and f2 is the bridge natural frequency of the anti-symmetric shape along the bridge direction. Finite element analyses indicate that the two criteria can predict the resonance of the arch bridge and the high-speed train precisely.