Reliability analysis of the dynamic behavior of railway bridges considering the vehicle-structure interaction

• Grant number: 21/12367-2
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Doctorate
• Start date: March 01, 2022
• Status: Discontinued
• Field of knowledge: Engineering - Civil Engineering - Structural Engineering
• Principal Investigator: Tulio Nogueira Bittencourt
• Grantee: Eduardo Costa Granato
• Host Institution: Escola Politécnica (EP). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Associated scholarship(s): 24/06964-6 - Probabilistic analysis of train running safety on railway bridges considering vehicle-structure interaction, BE.EP.DR

Abstract

The railway transportation mode is essential to the movement of goods and passengers in the world, and in the last decades advances in train technology allowed for a great increase in load capacity and vehicle speeds. In this context, it was necessary to develop sophisticated methods to analyze the railway bridges' structural systems dynamically, since the increasingly high loads and speeds induce significant dynamic responses on the bridge's structure and the interaction between the vehicle, rail and structure subsystems is relevant to obtain accurate answers in the structural analysis of the bridge and also passenger comfort and train running safety analyses. Numerical modelling of the structural systems of railway bridges is extremely complex, involving the consideration of the structure characteristics, vehicle and rail parameters considering different degrees of damping, wheel-rail contact non-linearity, parameters of the ballast and rail, among others. Besides, there is a great degree of uncertainty in the various variables involved in the analysis which must be considered to obtain realistic results. Thus, the reliability analysis approach is an essential to study structural systems considering uncertainties inherent to the problem to obtain a realistic assessment of the stress distributions, structural service conditions, train running safety and the structure's ultimate limit state. This project proposes the development of a reliability analysis methodology of railway bridges using dynamic analyses considering the interaction between the vehicle, rail and structure subsystems. (AU)