The Comparison of Different Approaches to Model Vehicle-Bridge Interaction

The results obtained from the numerical simulations of the vehicle-bridge interaction are appreciate sources of information that help to better understand the mechanism how the bridge responses to the moving vehicle. Several commercial computer programs that contain suitable contact algorithm are used for this purpose. Even though, there are often restrictions that define the limits for the simulation especially in the case when the irregularities on the road are treated. The development of the whole program which can solve this problem is difficult so there is good to use some open source applications that requires only some modifications to be used for this purpose. EasyDyn framework is a C++ library which can be used to create a multibody model of a vehicle. Then the development of the algorithm is only reduced to the finite element model of the bridge and the contact algorithm. In the paper there is presented this approach and the results are compared with the results obtained from the commercial software ADINA.