National Center for Wood Transportation Structures

About the research

This is a continuation of a previous project, RB11-015: Investigation of the Effect of Speed on Dynamic ImpactFactor for Bridges with Different Entrance Conditions, which determined that the roughness at the entrance to bridges is a primary influence on general dynamic impact factors. This new project will take the information found in that project and attempt to correlate the International Roughness Index (IRI) data collected by the Iowa Department of Transportation (DOT) with the dynamic impact factor (DIF) used when analyzing bridges for heavy load permits. The goal of this project is to develop a method to estimate the DIF value for a large number of bridges that can be used by load rating engineers.