Parametric evaluation of viscous damper retrofit for high-speed railway bridges

Abstract

Several of the bridges belonging to the Bothnia Line, located in northern Sweden, do not theoretically fulfil the current design limit for the vertical deck acceleration, when being subjected to high-speed trains. Hence, it is important to find appropriate vibration mitigation strategies that are applicable to railway bridges, in order to reduce the acceleration caused by passing trains. One way of solving this problem is to install external viscous dampers. A finite element solution for damper retrofit of high-speed railway bridges is proposed in this paper. The bridge is modelled as a two-dimensional Euler-Bernoulli beam, with inclined dashpots connected between the superstructure and the abutments. Furthermore, this paper highlights the influence of several parameters on the effectiveness of the dampers.