Abstract
Railway bridges are susceptible to over-height truck collisions and to address this issue, it is necessary to attenuate the effect of these impacts to ensure the safety of transportation operations. This study experimentally investigates the effectiveness of crash beams as a cushioning mechanism for railway bridges against collisions. Over-height truck and railway bridge impact events were simulated in a 1:5 scale experiment. The design parameters such as the stiffness of the crash beam and the bridge supports were scaled to evaluate different levels of attenuation. Seventeen experiments were conducted with five configurations consisting of four different types of crash beams and one no-crash beam arrangement. The results show that crash beams attenuate bridge total peak dynamic displacement responses between 14.5% and 35.7%, depending on the intensity of the impact and crash beam type. In addition, the results show that the average effectiveness in attenuating residual deformation for all four crash beams ranges from 43.03% to 83.40%. Finally, various designs and their effectiveness against lateral impacts with different speeds are discussed. The overall scope of this research is to provide objective information about the design of crash beams for railway bridges based on their response to over-height truck collisions at various speeds.
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Acknowledgment
This study was funded by the Scientific Research Fund of Institute of Engineering Mechanics, China Earthquake Administration (2016A06 and 2017A02); the National Natural Science Foundation of China (51678538 and 51878630); the Transportation Consortium of South-Central States (TRANSET); and U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT), Project No. 17STUNM02. Support from the Department of Civil, Construction and Environmental Engineering and the Center for Advanced Research and Computing (CARC) at the University of New Mexico is also appreciated. The authors thank the Canadian National Railway for providing critical input during the development of this study, in particular, Sandro Scola. The interpretation of the results obtained from this study are solely the opinion of the authors.
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Scientific Research Fund of Institute of Engineering Mechanics, China Earthquake Administration under Grant Nos. 2016A06 and 2017A02, the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant Nos. 51678538 and 51878630, the Transportation Consortium of South-Central States (TRANSET), and US Department of Transportation (USDOT), Project No. 17STUNM02
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Xu, D., Yuan, X., Ozdagli, A.I. et al. Over-height truck collisions with railway bridges: attenuation of damage using crash beams. Earthq. Eng. Eng. Vib. 21, 237–252 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11803-022-2081-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11803-022-2081-8