Generation of ground elastic waves by road vehicles

Ground elastic waves, or ground-borne vibrations, represent one of the major adverse environmental impacts of road vehicles, especially of heavy lorries. In the present paper, ground elastic waves generated by road vehicles are investigated theoretically. Two main generation mechanisms are considered. The first one is associated with vehicles travelling on rough or bumpy road surfaces, in particular over road humps installed at some sensitive road locations as a simple method of traffic calming. The second mechanism of generation is associated with acceleration and braking of road vehicles. General analytical results are illustrated by numerical examples and are compared with the existing experiments.