A Simple Approach for Simulating the Road Surface Roughness Involved in Vehicle-Bridge Interaction Systems

Abstract

This paper presents an idea for modeling the road surface roughness in a vehicle–bridge interaction (VBI) system, by simulating it equivalently as two external forces each acting on the two subsystems of vehicle and bridge. Such an idea can be easily included in general-purpose commercial finite element (FE) software like ABAQUS and ANSYS. Compared with frequently used coupled and uncoupled FE models, the present approach is more convenient, since it does not require any self-developed FE codes. The other advantage is that it does not require very small elements in the FE modeling, as is the case with conventional approaches for simulating the irregularity in the profile of road surface roughness, which may be computationally inefficient.