Truck Loads and Bridge Capacity Evaluation in China

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.