Lifetime-Oriented Structural Design Concepts- P5: At the beginning of 1996, the Cooperative Research Center SFB 398 financially supported by the German Science Foundation (DFG) was started at Ruhr-University Bochum (RUB). A scientists group representing the fields of structural engineering, structural mechanics, soil mechanics, material science, and numerical mathematics introduced a research program on “lifetimeoriented design concepts on the basis of damage and deterioration aspects”. | Transport and Mobility 77 number of vehivles and axles per year Fig. . Traffic records from the Netherlands recorded in 2006 periods of one or two years. In this case a further increase of these transports can be expected and it cannot be excluded that a significant percentage of these transports is overloaded. A possible increase in the number of such vehicles in combination with a possible overloading has especially to be considered for the development of future fatigue load models. A comparable development takes place in other European countries. Figure shows the vehicle weight and axle load distributions recorded in 2006 near the harbour of Rotterdam in the Netherlands. It can be seen that the extreme values of the gross weight and also the extreme values of the axle loads are significant higher than the values of the Auxerre traffic see Figure . The shape of the distribution shows that the heavy load transports lead in comparison with the Auxerre traffic to a new shape of the distribution which could be taken into account by splitting the distribution into a distribution for normal traffic and a distribution for heavy load transports. Additionally the transport industry is extremely interested in new transport concepts at present. In some European countries and also in some German federal states field trials take place with modular vehicle concepts the so called Giga-Liners with gross weight up to 600 kN and a total length of m 314 . Typical vehicles and the corresponding allowable axle loads are shown in Figures and . These types of vehicles have significant higher transport capacities and can reduce the transport cost. At present it cannot be foreseen how the future traffic composition will change. Some people argue that the new modular concept will reduce the total number of lorries on roads due to the higher transport capacity. On the other hand it has to be 78 2 Damage-Oriented Actions and Environmental Impact Fig. . .
