Study on the safe value of multi-pier settlement for simply supported girder bridges in high-speed railways

This paper presents a method to analyse the influence of multi-pier settlement on the train–track–bridge coupled dynamic system, and to determine the safe value of the continuous multi-pier settlement for simply supported girder bridges in Chinese high-speed railways. Firstly, the mapping relationship between the multi-pier settlement and the rail deformation is derived theoretically. Then, taking the superposition of the rail deformation and the track random irregularity as excitation, the variations of vehicle dynamic indices are analysed based on the train–track–bridge dynamic interaction theory. Further, the relationships between the pier settlement and the change amounts of vehicle dynamic indices are obtained. The multi-pier settlement safe value is determined according to the limits of vehicle dynamic indices. Results show that the rail deformation caused by multi-pier settlement agrees well with the settlement data. When passing through the 32.6 m-long simply supported girder bridge with multi-pier settlement, the train suffers a low-frequency excitation. Only considering the influence of pier settlement, the settlement value difference between two adjacent piers should be less than 26.3 mm at China’s highest operation speed of 350 km/h from the perspective of dynamics, which is much larger than the pier settlement limit in the current code for Chinese high-speed railways.