STUDY OF EFFECT OF ROLLING VEHICLE LOADS ON SIMPLY SUPPORTED BRIDGES

Abstract

A study in this thesis has been made on the effect of rolling vehicle loads such as encountered in standard railway loadings. Such a loading usually consists of a train of wagons and locomotives. The rational determination of a load position for producing maximum bending moment, shear force and deflection is normally not possible by manual calculation. The standard software packages like STAAD.Pro, etc are capable of handling only Moving Point Loads (MPL) not Moving Uniformly Distributed Loads (MUDL) or combination of these. There are formulae available by which positioning of loads corresponding to maximum moment and shear force for number of MPL are worked out with ease and accuracy. It's very easy to determine maximum moment and shear force in case of only MUDL. Many a time in real life, designer comes across situation in which there is combination of MUDL and MPL. In these situations either designer go. for finding out moments and shear forces at different locations as required for curtailmentletc or define an Equivalent Uniformly Distributed Load (EUDL) as a static load based on experience or specified rules. The first method requires time and manual effort where as the second method may either lead to uneconomical design or unsafe design at some sections or other. To overcome these problems, software is developed using C language on Windows XP platform, which can be effectively used to find the maximum bending moments, shear forces and deflections as well as corresponding load position at any section. Software is also developed for calculation of pier reaction supporting simply supported span on either sides.