Response of suspended beams due to moving loads and vertical seismic ground excitations

In this paper, the vibration of a suspension bridge due to moving loads of equidistant, identical forces and shaken by vertical support motions caused by earthquake is studied. The suspension bridge is modelled as a single-span suspended beam. To conduct the beam vibration with time-dependent boundary conditions, the total response of the suspended beam is decomposed into two parts: the quasistatic component and the dynamic part based on the decomposition method. Since the quasi-static component of the suspended beam under the static action of multiple support motions has been obtained analytically, the remaining dynamic part can be solved using Galerkin’s method. The numerical results indicate that the contribution of higher modes on the maximum acceleration of the suspended beams to moving loads will become significant as the propagation effect and multiple support motions of seismic waves in the subsoil of bridge supports has been taken into account.