Vehicle ride comfort analysis with whole-body vibration on long-span bridges subjected to crosswind

Vehicle ride comfort issues for the drivers are related to not only individual satisfaction of driving experience, but also driving safety and long-term health of the drivers. A new methodology of ride comfort analysis is presented for typical vehicles driven on long-span bridges considering realistic traffic and environmental loads such as wind excitations. Built on the simulation framework developed previously by the writers, complex interactions among the long-span bridge, all the vehicles in the traffic flow and wind excitations are appropriately modeled. Vehicle ride comfort condition is evaluated by extending the advanced procedures as currently recommended in the ISO 2631-1 standard to the scenarios of multiple vehicles in the stochastic traffic flow, including obtaining the whole-body vibration response, frequency weighting the original response and determining the Overall Vibration Total Value (OVTV). The proposed methodology is then applied to a prototype long-span cable-stayed bridge and traffic system to demonstrate the proposed ride comfort evaluation methodology. The study starts with the baseline scenario when the vehicles are driven on the rigid road without considering the interactions with the supporting structure and wind excitations, followed by the scenarios of vehicles driven on the bridge. The influences of dynamic interactions, presence of other vehicles and wind excitations on the ride comfort are also numerically evaluated.