Combined Analysis of Roadway Quality, Truck Axle Loads and the Service Life of Concrete Bridges

Combined analysis of roadway, truck axle loads and the service life of concrete bridges The increasing need for rehabilitation of road bridges in Germany results in a growing importance of planning their maintenance and new constructions. The more accurate the knowledge about impacts is, the more precise forecasts of the service life of structures can be. This is not only relevant for bridge construction, but also for the automotive industry, where detailed, time-varying axle loads are measured and simulated with the aim of vehicle optimisation. Using these data and simulation methods, the question of a possible connection between road quality and the service life of road bridges arises for civil engineering. By setting higher requirements for the pavement quality in the area of bridges, dynamic loads could be reduced and extensive renovations of the load-bearing structure could be avoided or delayed. In order to investigate a possible correlation, a procedure for determining the influence of the pavement quality on the service life of road bridges is presented below. For this purpose, realistic road surfaces are generated and used to trigger a forced vibration at the simplified axle and vehicle models on a coupled structure-vehicle system. Based on this, the time varying internal forces of the structure can be calculated and analysed for their damage potential. Finally, this methodology is illustrated by means of an example. It can be demonstrated that in this case a clear correlation between surface quality and service life can be identified.