Runability Analysis of the New Storstrøm Bridge Due to Wind Action and Ship Impacts

In the process of designing long span bridges, runability analysis plays an important role. In fact, it deals with the assessment of the impact on the structure’s response and train running safety of external factors such as environmental actions, like wind and earthquake, or catastrophic events like ship impact. Runability analysis involves a combination of local aspects (e.g. wheel–rail interaction) with global and local bridge dynamic response. In this respect, runability analysis represents a complex task to be tackled and requires adequate modelling. The present work proposes a runability study to be performed on the New Storstrøm Bridge, which is currently under construction in Denmark connecting Zealand with Falster. In this numerical analysis. two scenarios have been considered separately: ship impact on the bridge’s superstructure and wind action on a rail vehicle, using both the “Chinese hat” and stochastic turbulent wind formulations. The outcomes of this study clearly show that, even when threshold values were locally reached in terms of train running safety, a close examination of the local wheel–rail contact condition helps in defining the expected evolution of the dynamics of the train and thus documenting a higher safety level than indicated by the basic requirements.