An Integrated Environment for Simulations of Heavy Vehicles Riding over Flexible Bridges

The main object was to perform simulations using a realistic model of a truck and trailer passing over a flexible bridge structure. The bridge structure was simplified to a flat surface modeled using shell finite elements. Tire normal, lateral and longitudinal forces were applied to the bridge. Three driving cases were considered: straight forward driving with and without braking and a lane change maneuver. In the braking case control logic was used to distribute the braking torques to the wheel axles. A general multibody dynamics program, DADS, and its tire subroutines were interfaced with FEM routines in order to create a vehicle/structure interaction computer program. Different time stepping algorithms from the multibody dynamics and FEM disciplines were integrated into a " common " time integration procedure. The program ANSYS was used for postprocessing of bridge stresses.