A combined control strategy for vibration mitigations of a suspension bridge induced by vehicle braking force

In order to mitigate the excessive longitudinal displacement responses of suspension bridge girders induced by vehicle braking force, as one of the possible dynamic loadings, a combined control strategy consisting of viscous dampers and friction pendulum bearings is developed in this paper. Firstly, the vehicle composition and the braking force models of the Pingsheng Bridge are obtained by traffic survey and testing results, respectively. Then, the vibration response analysis for the bridge under the braking force is implemented using the MIDAS finite element model. Furthermore, viscous dampers and friction pendulum bearings are separately employed to reduce the vibration responses. The influence matrix method is first used to determine the optimal parameters of viscous dampers. Finally, the effect of the combined control strategy for the vibration control is investigated. The numerical analysis results indicate that utilizing the influence matrix method for the parameter optimization of viscous dampers is feasible and effective. It is also shown that the longitudinal displacement response of the Pingsheng Bridge subjected to the vehicle braking force can be effectively mitigated by viscous dampers, friction pendulum bearings or the combined control with the optimized parameters, and the combined control outperforms the viscous dampers or the friction pendulum bearings alone.