A feasible vibration measurement and active control method of reinforced concrete lightweight pier railway bridges for heavy-haul monorail trains

Abstract

This paper aims at introducing a novel method to control the lateral vibration of reinforced concrete, lightweight pier railway bridges (LPRBs) with heavy-haul (HH) monorail trains. For this purpose, a two-pier LPRB was strengthened using different techniques, and the dynamic performance of the reinforced bridge was evaluated for all the configurations. This paper compared the dynamic performance of LPRB increased by different plans. Meanwhile, a HH monorail train with two bogies was described by a three-dimension (3D) discrete rigid multi-body system with 23 degrees of freedoms (DOFs), while the two-pier LPRB was considered as an assemblage of beam elements with six DOFs at each node. Then, a finite element (FE) model train-bridge coupling system (TBCS) was set up based on the time-varying theory. After massive experimentally and numerically study, the dynamic analyses of the bridge and the running safety (RS) indexes of the train were conducted for each reinforcement plan using the program Dynamic Interaction Analysis for HH Train-Bridge System (DIAHHTBS). The results show that both the dynamic responses of the bridge and RS indices of the trains fulfilled the requirements in relevant specifications. It might mean that the proposed reinforcement method can strengthen the lateral stiffness of the bridge and reduce the amplitude of lateral vibration.

Keywords:

• Dynamic responses
• performance assessment
• reinforcement method
• lightweight pier railway bridge (LPRB)
• railway bridge
• heavy-haul (HH) monorail Trains

Acknowledgments

Special thanks are due to Professor Lennart Elfgren from the Luleå University of Technology and Professor Fernando Moreu from the University of New Mexico for their valuable contributions. The authors thank the editor and two anonymous referees for their useful suggested improvements and comments. The first author was funded by the Jiangsu provincial government scholarship program to visit the University of California, Los Angeles for one year.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Hunan Innovative Provincial Construction Project under Grant No. 2019RS3009; The National Science Foundation of China under Grant No. 51778630, 51578478, 51878589, 51708485 and 51708484; The Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province, PR China under Grant No. BK20161337; The China Postdoctoral Science Foundation under Grant No. 2015M581702, and 2016M592695.