Download or read book Statistical Analysis of Traffic Loads and Their Effects on Bridges written by Xiao Yi Zhou and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traffic load model in standard or specification for bridge design should guarantee all newly designed bridges to have sufficient security margin for future traffic. Many different methods have been used to model extreme traffic load effects on bridges for predicting characteristic value for short or long return period. In order to provide some guidance on selecting parameter estimation when applying POT to bridge traffic loading, we focus on the effect that method used to estimate the parameters of the GPD has on the accuracy of the estimated characteristic values. Through this qualitative discussion on the methods, several available methods for traffic loading are selected. Numerical simulation data, Monte Carlo simulation traffic load effects and in-field traffic load effect measurements are analyzed and presented. Literature points out that the traffic load effect is induced by loading event that involves different number of vehicles, and the distribution of the load effects from different loading events are not identically distributed, which violates the assumption of classic extreme value theory that the underlying distribution should be identically independent distributed. Methods using mixture distribution (exponential or generalized extreme value) has been proposed in the literature to model the extreme traffic load effect by loading event. However, the traffic loading may be also importance if the bridge encounter traffic induced fatigue problem, components like orthotropic steel deck is governed by traffic induced fatigue load effects. We intend to explore the influence of traffic load on the fatigue behaviour of orthotropic steel deck, especially the influence of the loading position in terms of transverse location of vehicle. Measurements of transverse location of vehicle collected from by weigh-in-motion (WIM) systems in 2010 and 2011 four French highways showed a completely different distribution model of transverse location of vehicle to that recommended in EC1. Stress spectrum analysis and fatigue damage calculation was performed on the stresses induced traffic on orthotropic steel deck of Millau cable-stayed bridge. By comparing the stresses and damages induced by different traffic patterns (through distributions of transverse location of vehicle), it was found that the histogram of stress spectrum and cumulative fatigue damage were significantly affected by the distribution of transverse location of vehicle. Therefore, numerical analysis that integrates finite element modelling and traffic data with distributions of transverse location of vehicles can help to make an accurate predetermination of which welded connections should be sampled to represent the health of the deck.