Reduction of Vertical Acceleration in High-speed Railway Bridges Using Post-installed Viscous Dampers : A case study of the Bothnia Line

Sammanfattning: Several of the bridges along the Bothnia railway line do not fulfill the requirements regarding vertical accelerations that are stated in current design codes. The acceleration of the bridges needs to be reduced, in order to make the Bothnia line suitable for high speed railway traffic. The aim with this thesis is to investigate if it is possible to reduce the vertical acceleration of insufficient bridges to an acceptable level by using post-installed dampers. The expectation was that this method could have major economic advantages compared to other rehabilitation methods. Five different bridges with post-installed dampers were simulated in verified MATLAB codes. The simulations were performed for two cases for each bridge: one where the eccentricities between the attachment of the damper and the centre of gravity of the bridge cross section was taken into consideration, and one where the influence from the eccentricities was excluded. The results showed that it is fully possible to reduce the acceleration to an acceptable level with the use of external damper configurations. It was also shown that the eccentricities of the bridges had a high impact in this kind of simulations. Furthermore, some supplementary investigations regarding the location and position of the damper, were done as well. Finally, a brief analysis and discussion regarding the practical implementation of the post-installed was performed. One challenge is to anchor the damper and take care of the resulting forces in a favourable and safe way.