Fragility analysis for vehicle derailment on railway bridges under earthquakes

• Published in: 铁道工程科学（英文版） Vol. 30; no. 4; pp. 494 - 511
• Main Authors: Zhibin Jin, Weizhan Liu
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Department of Bridge Engineering,Southwest Jiaotong University,Chengdu 610031,China 2022
• Subjects: Decoupling method; Earthquake; Intensity measure; Vehicle derailment; Vehicle–bridge interaction model
• ISSN: 2095-087X

With the rapid development of high-speed rail-ways around the globe, the safety of vehicles running on bridges during earthquakes has been paid more attention to. In the design of railway bridges, in addition to ensuring the safety of the bridge structure in earthquake, the vehicle safety should also be ensured. Previous studies have focused on the detailed analysis of vehicle derailment on bridges, proposing complex numerical algorithms for wheel–rail contact analysis as well as for parametric analysis, but they are inconvenient for designers. Intensity measure (IM) used in performance-based earthquake engineering is introduced in this study. A method to evaluate the vehicle safety on bridges under earthquakes is proposed with respect to the optimal IM. Then, the vehicle derailment case of the Kuma-moto earthquake in Japan verifies the decoupling method of vehicle–bridge interaction model. In the assessment of vehi-cle derailments, eight IMs are systematically compared: the IMs of bridge deck motion are generally better than those of ground motion; the variation coefficient of spectral intensity of the bridge deck is the smallest at different frequencies. Finally, the derailment fragility cloud map is presented to evaluate the vehicle safety on bridges during earthquakes.