Locality of Truck Loads and Adequacy of Bridge Design Load |
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Authors: | John W van de Lindt Gongkang Fu Yingmin Zhou Reynaldo M Pablo Jr |
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Affiliation: | 1Associate Professor, Colorado State Univ., Fort Collins, CO 80523-1372. E-mail: jwv@engr.colostate.edu 2Professor, Wayne State Univ., Detroit, MI 48202. E-mail: gfu@eng.wayne.edu 3Graduate Research Assistant, Michigan Technological Univ., Houghton, MI 49931. 4Doctoral Candidate, Wayne State Univ., Detroit, MI 48202.
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Abstract: | United States highway bridge design has advanced into the era of risk-based practice, milestoned by the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials Load and Resistance Factor Design Bridge Design Specifications. On the other hand, national and state design codes cannot specifically account for localized risk for each bridge site, which may have significantly different loading conditions from the national average. This issue is focused on here, as related to the adequacy of current bridge design loads for sites in the state of Michigan. The structural reliability indices are calculated for a randomly selected sample of new bridges from the Michigan inventory, including four major girder bridge types. Weigh-in-motion truck load data collected in Michigan are used to statistically characterize the truck load effect in the bridges’ primary members for moment and shear at critical cross sections. The reliability indices are found to vary significantly among the bridge sites and types investigated. Many of them indicate inadequate design load for the Detroit area. |
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Keywords: | Bridge design Structural reliability Bridge safety Trucks Loads Bearing capacity |
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