Vehicle-Bridge Interactions (VBI) in High-Speed Rail Corridors

Abstract: Moving railway vehicles on the bridges cause excitation in the bridge components and owing to this there is increase in the forces like (bending, shear, torsion, displacement, etc). This increase in the forces in the bridge components are computed using Dynamic impact factor. Dynamic impact factor is applied on to the axles to get the dynamic effect on the bridges. Our Indian Railway codes provide the value DIF (called Coefficient of Dynamic Augment) for speed up to 160 kmph. Most of the railway and metro lines are operating with speed lesser than that, therefore, Coefficient of Dynamic Augment (CDA) can be conveniently taken from codes. For any speed greater than 160 kmph CDA shall need to be computed as per the dynamic analysis as per available international codes. As mentioned earlier that there is imminent need of high-speed rail network in India due to increase in economic activity, increase in travel choices, improvement in mobility, reduction in congestion and to boost productivity. Our objective of this thesis is to study dynamic response of a various types of bridges under high-speed trains currently being used in India for high-speed rail projects like RRTS (Delhi to Meerut and other corridors) and High-speed rail project from Mumbai to Ahmedabad to accurately assess the DIF in bridges under the effect of different governing factors (vehicle speed, vehicle load, bridge superstructure type, etc). This study could be beneficial in upcoming projects of high-speed rail as it is our future need.