A heavy truck-infrastructure interaction model

The interaction between heavy trucks and pavement can take place in two different infrastructure scenarios: roads and bridges. A multitude of influential characteristics and properties linked to both the infrastructure and the vehicle determine the consequences of this interaction for the infrastructure and the vehicle, including the infrastructure damage arising from vehicle total forces, and vehicle damage due to their vibration as a result of road roughness. In this paper a computational scheme is proposed to simulate the dynamic vehicle-infrastructure interaction in the case of pavements and bridges. The computational transition matrix scheme considered, uses a common finite element formulation for both types of infrastructure, involving linear damped viscoelastic beams and bars in the case of the pavement, and linear damped elastic beams in the case of the bridge. Furthermore, an iterative process is formulated in such a way that the pavement and bridge responses are used to update the pavement profile that perturbs the vehicle. A parametric analysis reveals a close relationship between the maximum deflections obtained for both types of infrastructure, in which the infrastructure deflection increases with road roughness, short wheelbases, stiff suspensions and low speeds. On the other hand, the pavement temperature represents the most influential property for pavement deflection. The user interface created for the program includes the creation of ASCII data files containing the vehicle and pavement properties.