Truck Loads and Bridge Capacity Evaluation in China
Publication: Journal of Bridge Engineering
Volume 14, Issue 5
Abstract
Over the past 2–3 decades, the economic development in China has natured the establishment of a highway network with a large number of bridges. However, there are still no nationwide specification provisions for assessing their safe load carrying capacity. The research work reported herein focuses on developing reliability based requirements for this purpose. In this study, weigh-in-motion data for more than 7.3 million trucks were gathered from highways in three provinces of China, continuously over 1–16 months in 2006 and 2007. The data were processed and projected to model the live-load spectrum over 3-year and 100-year periods, respectively. The former is the required bridge inspection interval and the latter the bridge design life span, according to current Chinese maintenance and design specifications. The proposed projection method is shown to be more reliable compared with those reported. The resulting load spectra are used to assess the structural reliability of typical Chinese highway bridges at the component level. Based on the accordingly selected target reliability index, the live-load factors for bridge evaluation are developed in this study, proposed to be included in the Chinese national specifications.
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Acknowledgments
This research effort was financially supported by the Ministry of Education of China, the U.S. National Cooperative Highway Research Program, and Michigan Department of Transportation. New York State Department of Transportation kindly provided their WIM data from many stations for a number of years. The writers gratefully appreciate the support and assistance.
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Information & Authors
Information
Published In
Journal of Bridge Engineering
Volume 14 • Issue 5 • September 2009
Pages: 327 - 335
Copyright
© 2009 ASCE.
History
Received: Jul 29, 2008
Accepted: Nov 16, 2008
Published online: Aug 14, 2009
Published in print: Sep 2009
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