For road transportation, in several European countries the use of the so called Long and Heavy Vehicles (LHVs), characterised by total mass up to 60 t, is allowed instead of the more usual Heavy Good Vehicles (HGVs), whose total mass is limited to 44 t. Aiming to evaluate the impact of the adoption of LHVs on the fatigue assessments of steel bridges, the fatigue damages as well as the maximum stress ranges produced in simple supported beams, spanning between 1 m and 100 m, by the reference Auxerre (F) traffic and by the fatigue load models of Eurocode EN1991-2, are compared among them as well as with the ones produced by a traffic recorded in 2007 in Moerdijk (NL), representative of the modern traffic trends being characterised by a significant percentage of LHVs. The comparison, confirms that the EN1991-2 fatigue load models cover satisfactorily the effects produced by the most aggressive European traffics. At the end, the obtained results permit the recalibration of the damage equivalence factors λi given in the Eurocode EN1993-2, allowing their possible improvement
Modern traffic trends and fatigue assessments of steel bridges
CROCE, PIETRO;FORMICHI, PAOLO
2010-01-01
Abstract
For road transportation, in several European countries the use of the so called Long and Heavy Vehicles (LHVs), characterised by total mass up to 60 t, is allowed instead of the more usual Heavy Good Vehicles (HGVs), whose total mass is limited to 44 t. Aiming to evaluate the impact of the adoption of LHVs on the fatigue assessments of steel bridges, the fatigue damages as well as the maximum stress ranges produced in simple supported beams, spanning between 1 m and 100 m, by the reference Auxerre (F) traffic and by the fatigue load models of Eurocode EN1991-2, are compared among them as well as with the ones produced by a traffic recorded in 2007 in Moerdijk (NL), representative of the modern traffic trends being characterised by a significant percentage of LHVs. The comparison, confirms that the EN1991-2 fatigue load models cover satisfactorily the effects produced by the most aggressive European traffics. At the end, the obtained results permit the recalibration of the damage equivalence factors λi given in the Eurocode EN1993-2, allowing their possible improvementI documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
