Dynamic analysis of railway bridges incorporating soil-structure interaction

Abstract This paper presents a dynamic analysis of a reinforced concrete railway bridge in northern Brazil, built in 1980, under the passage of heavy-haul railway vehicles. A parameterized geometric model of the bridge was developed using Rhino/Grasshopper, and a programming routine was implemented on GiD to automate the pre-processing modeling stage and generate outputs compatible with different FEM solvers. The dynamic analysis was then performed, accounting for the soil-structure interaction to reproduce the modes and natural frequencies of the analyzed asset. The computational model was calibrated and validated using modal identification results obtained from a structural health monitoring campaign. The validated model formed the basis for assessing the structural resilience of the bridge, indicating promising results regarding adopting the proposed modeling strategy.