Influence of the pavement conditions on the bridge response

This work investigates the influence of pavement conditions on the bridge response. When monitoring is available for the bridge at study, a correlation between the response, usually in terms of acceleration, and the roughness level can point out the need for a maintenance intervention. This paper focuses on the preliminary numerical work devoted to the study of vehicle-bridge interaction, taking advantage of a combined usage of a commercial and of a research code. The case study is a 4-span 60m long highway viaduct in the Northern Italy. Static and dynamic tests were performed after the installation of the SHM system (MEMS clinometers and accelerometers) and its dynamic behavior was continuously mon-itored in conditions of pre- and post-paving. A FE model was established with SAP2000 and updated to account for the experimental results. As a positive novelty of this work, the analysis of bridge-vehicle interaction is tackled by exploiting the capabilities of the commercial code and of a previously developed research code, named INTER. The struc-tural matrices and the relevant tables of nodes are extracted from SAP2000 and, after some manipulations, adopted as input data to INTER. The interaction analysis accounts for roughness and adopts an ad-hoc developed 13-DOFs vehicle model, representing the one adopted in tests. Preliminary results show the influence of the roughness on the accel-eration of selected points, investigating the variability of results tied to the generation of roughness profiles from the PSD function in Eurocode1.