Generation of Surface Roughness Profiles for Inclusion in Vehicle–Bridge Interaction Analysis and Test Application

Vehicle’s wheels were mostly modeled as a point, which can touch the valleys of pavement roughness, creating unrealistic high-frequency oscillation. This can be avoided by using the disk model for the wheels, which however adds significant complexity to the vehicle–bridge interaction (VBI) analysis. In this paper, a refined roughness formula is generated to account for the wheel size effect such that it can be used by point model. Still, the low-frequency part of the roughness presents some masking effect on the bridge scanning by the test vehicle. To this end, two countermeasures are suggested, i.e. residual response and traffic flows. This study has demonstrated that: (1) the roughness generated by the refined formula can reflect the trace of the disk model; (2) the refined formula facilitates the VBI analysis by using the point model; and (3) the two countermeasures for roughness are effective for improving the scanning of bridge frequencies.