A New Combination Method of Temperature and Vehicle Load Effects Based on SHM Data

When more than one load act on a structure, the combination of the load effects should be considered, especially for which are variant in time and in space. A new method to calculate the combination of two different loads effects as well as to predict the extreme value distributions in the subsequent service life is proposed. The loads discussed in this paper are two main loads acting on the cable-stayed bridge: the temperature and vehicle load, which can be modeled as rectangular pulse process and filtered Poisson process respectively. Firstly, truncated distributions of the two load effects are depicted using the monitoring data of Nanjing 3rd Yangtze River Bridge. The generalized Pareto distribution fits well to the upper tails of the vehicle load effect and the mean values of the temperature load effect in an hour follows a two weighted normal distribution. Then the combination of the two load effects as well as the prediction of extreme values in the subsequent service life can be calculated. In the end, the results obtained through the proposed method are compared with the observed value of the bridge.