A New Moving Kirchhoff–Love Plate Element for Dynamic Analysis of Vehicle–Pavement Interaction

A new moving Kirchhoff–Love plate element is developed in this work to accurately and efficiently calculate the dynamic response of vehicle–pavement interaction. Since the vehicle can only affect a small region nearby, the wide pavement is reduced to a small reduced plate area around the vehicle. The vehicle loads moving along an arbitrary trajectory is considered, and the arbitrary Lagrangian–Eulerian (ALE) method is used here for coordinate conversion. The reduced plate area is spatially discretized using the current moving plate element (MPE), where its governing equations are derived using Lagrange’s equations. The moving plate element is validated by different plate subjected to moving load cases. Then a vehicle–pavement interaction case with constant and variable speed is analyzed here. The calculation results from the moving plate element are in good agreement with those from the modal superposition method (MSM), and the calculation time with the moving plate element is only one-third of that using the MSM. The moving plate element is accurate and more efficient than the MSM in calculating the dynamic response of the vehicle–pavement interaction.