Time domain iterative procedures for vehicle-bridge dynamic interaction

This work, based on the adoption of separate and decoupled mechanical models for the vehicle and the bridge to be analysed in the time domain, aims at developing two different iteration strategies, one on the whole time history (procedure WTH) and the other on the single time-step (procedure STS). The former can be easily applied with any commercial code and might deal with slight non linearity; the latter, still under implementation, can be further developed to include the effects of any non linearity in both the structure and the vehicle. Parametric studies are performed, making use of the WTH procedure, on a 3D model of a reinforced concrete simply supported bridge 30.3 m long, and two travelling vehicles modelled as 7-degrees of freedom (DOFs) systems; the effect of road roughness, vehicle mass, speed and frequency are considered. Moreover, the precision and rate of convergence of the WTH procedure are investigated: while appealing for its generality, a theoretical proof of its convergence properties is in fact missing.