Performance-based Seismic Assessment of Skewed Bridges with and Without Considering Soil-structure Interaction Effects for Various Site Classes

Performance-based Seismic Assessment of Skewed Bridges with and Without Considering Soil-structure Interaction Effects for Various Site Classes
Author: Abdoulreza Ghotbi
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2014
Genre: Bridges
ISBN: 9781303925597

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Abstract: This study aims to investigate the behavior of skewed and straight highway overpass bridges both with and without taking into account the effects of Soil-Structure Interaction (SSI) due to near-fault ground motions. Both deterministic (i.e., pushover and nonlinear dynamic analyses) and probabilistic approaches were utilized. A set of response sensitivity analyses was performed considering various skew angles, column elements, and soil properties for bridge considered both as fixed-base and SSI models. It has been observed that as the skew angle increased, the bridge responded more severely to the ground motion. For instance, the deck rotation and shear-keys displacement increased with an increase in the skew angle. A modal pushover analysis was also performed in conjunction with the nonlinear dynamic analysis. It has been found that combining the bridge responses for various modes of vibration resulted in a relatively accurate seismic response compared to the nonlinear dynamic analysis while saving time and analysis cost, to a great extent. A probabilistic analysis was also performed considering record-to-record variability in ground motion, and a set of probabilistic seismic demand and fragility plots was generated. The effects of change in the skew angle and also SSI were studied to see various bridge responses. The damage probability increased especially with respect to deck rotation as the skew angle increased. The SSI had a decreasing effect on the overall response of the bridge with pile foundation.

Seismic Design and Assessment of Bridges

Seismic Design and Assessment of Bridges
Author: Andreas J Kappos
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 233
Release: 2012-04-17
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 9400739435

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The book focuses on the use of inelastic analysis methods for the seismic assessment and design of bridges, for which the work carried out so far, albeit interesting and useful, is nevertheless clearly less than that for buildings. Although some valuable literature on the subject is currently available, the most advanced inelastic analysis methods that emerged during the last decade are currently found only in the specialised research-oriented literature, such as technical journals and conference proceedings. Hence the key objective of this book is two-fold, first to present all important methods belonging to the aforementioned category in a uniform and sufficient for their understanding and implementation length, and to provide also a critical perspective on them by including selected case-studies wherein more than one methods are applied to a specific bridge and by offering some critical comments on the limitations of the individual methods and on their relative efficiency. The book should be a valuable tool for both researchers and practicing engineers dealing with seismic design and assessment of bridges, by both making the methods and the analytical tools available for their implementation, and by assisting them to select the method that best suits the individual bridge projects that each engineer and/or researcher faces.

Seismic Modeling, Quantifying and Protection of Highway Bridges Considering Shaking and Lateral Spreading

Seismic Modeling, Quantifying and Protection of Highway Bridges Considering Shaking and Lateral Spreading
Author: Yazhou Xie
Publisher:
Total Pages: 232
Release: 2017
Genre:
ISBN:

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This dissertation systematically addresses the modeling, quantifying, and protection of highway bridges against earthquake hazards. Firstly, the research substantially improves the p-y spring based simulation method to predict the seismic responses of highway bridges that accounts for various soil-structure interaction effects. Closed-form formulae are provided for the p-y spring input parameters to capture the bridge-embankment interaction effects, based on which an integrated step-by-step modeling procedure is developed. The procedure is applied to simulate the seismic responses of a well instrumented highway overcrossing and validated against the recorded responses during the 1992 Petrolia earthquake. Secondly, the study derives a response modification factor to quantify the relative impact of liquefaction induced lateral spreading with respect to seismic shaking on column drifts for highway bridges. The column drift response under lateral spreading is correlated to the crust layer energy imposed on the pile foundation at bridge piers. Under seismic shaking, the column drift ratio is directly related to the peak ground acceleration. By normalizing the column drift under the lateral spreading to that of under the seismic shaking, the proposed modification factor captures key features of how columns respond under both lateral spreading and seismic shaking, and offers reliable column drift demand predictions. Thirdly, this study investigates the effectiveness and optimal design of seismic protective devices for highway bridges. Component-level fragility functions are developed by using the probabilistic seismic demand analysis. To transparently quantify the bridge performance at the system level, seismic repair cost ratios are derived to combine damage probabilities, damage ratios and replacement costs of critical bridge components. Thereafter, a multi-objective genetic optimization method with the Pareto optimal concept is employed to identify the optimal design parameters of protective devices. Subsequently, the research derives a consistent performance index to facilitate the performance-based design and optimization of seismic protective devices. By converting the system-level repair cost ratio to be a function of median-level engineering demand parameters, a uniform design surface is generated for various protection designs. The derived surface can be easily implemented in the performance-based seismic protection design and optimization without iteratively updating the design goal when a new group of design parameters are considered. The robustness of the proposed method is examined in a case study to identify the optimal protection designs by using a genetic optimization scheme. Lastly, the study derives the seismic demand models for bridge rocking columns with foundation on rigid supports when subject to horizontal near-fault strong motions. The system equations of motion are derived and solved to incorporate the column flexibility and the rocking impact mechanism. By representing the near-fault ground motions with corresponding pulses, dimensional analyses are carried out to regress the closed-form expressions of system's drift and uplift demands. A rigorous validation process is implemented to demonstrate that the proposed models can be used with confidence to predict the seismic demands of the rocking system directly from structural and ground motion characteristics.

Response Sensitivity of Highway Bridges to Random Multi-component Earthquake Excitation

Response Sensitivity of Highway Bridges to Random Multi-component Earthquake Excitation
Author: Kyle John Cronin
Publisher:
Total Pages: 89
Release: 2009
Genre: Bridges
ISBN:

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Highway bridges provide a critical lifeline during extreme seismic events and must maintain serviceability under a large range of earthquake intensities. Consequently, the advent of more computational power has allowed more advanced analysis approaches for predicting performance and vulnerability of highway bridges under these seismic loads. In traditional two-dimensional finite element analyses, it has been demonstrated that the incidence angle of the ground motion can play a significant role in structural response. As three-dimensional nonlinear time history analyses are used more frequently in practice, ground motions are still usually applied along a single bridge axis. It is unknown how three orthogonal components of ground motion excitation should be applied to the structure to best represent the true response. In this study, the fundamental behavior of three-dimensional ground motion was studied using single-degree-of-freedom elastic spectra. Mean spectra computed from various orientation techniques were found indistinguishable when the orthogonal components were combined. The effect of incidence angle on the nonlinear structural response of highway bridges was then investigated through extensive statistical simulation. Three different bridge models were employed for this study implementing a suite of 180 multi-component ground motion records of various magnitude-distance-soil bins. Probabilistic seismic demand models for various response parameters are presented comparing the effects of random incidence angle to that of recorded directions. Although there are instances where the angle of incidence can significantly amplify response, results indicated that incidence angle had negligible effect on average ensemble response. This is consistent with results from the spectral analysis, although existing literature has emphasized incidence angle as a significant parameter of multi-component analysis.

Seismic Performance Evaluation of Reinforced Concrete Bridge Piers Considering Postearthquake Capacity Degradation

Seismic Performance Evaluation of Reinforced Concrete Bridge Piers Considering Postearthquake Capacity Degradation
Author: Borislav Todorov
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2021
Genre:
ISBN:

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Bridges play a key role in the transportation sector while serving as lifelines for the economy and safety of communities. The need for resilient bridges is especially important following natural disasters, where they serve as evacuation, aid, and supply routes to an affected area. Much of the earthquake engineering community is interested in improving the resiliency of bridges, and many contributions to the field have been made in the past decades, where a shift towards performancebased design (PBD) practices is underway. While the Canadian Highway Bridge Design Code (CHBDC) has implemented PBD as a requirement for the seismic design of lifeline and major route bridges, the nature of PBD techniques translate to a design process that is not universally compatible for all scenarios and hazards. Therefore, there is great benefit to be realised in the development of PBD guidelines for mainshock-aftershock seismic sequences for scenarios in which the chance to assess and repair a bridge is not possible following a recent mainshock. This research analytically explored a parameterized set of 20 reinforced concrete bridge piers which share several geometrical and material properties with typical bridge bents that support many Canadian bridges. Of those piers, half are designed using current PBD guidelines provided in the 2019 edition of the CHBDC, whereas the remaining half are designed with insufficient transverse reinforcement commonly found in the bridges designed pre-2000. To support this study, a nonlinear fiber-based modelling approach with a proposed material strength degradation scheme is developed using the OpenSEES finite element analysis software. A multiple conditional mean spectra (CMS) approach is used to select a suite of 50 mainshock-aftershock ground motion records for the selected site in Vancouver, British Columbia, which consist of crustal, inslab, and interface earthquakes that commonly occur in areas near the Cascadia Subduction zone. Nonlinear time history analysis is performed for mainshock-only and mainshock-aftershock excitations, and static pushover analysis is also performed in lateral and axial directions for the intact columns, as well as in their respective post-MS and post-AS damaged states. Using the resulting data, a framework for post-earthquake seismic capacity estimation of the bridge piers is developed using machine learning regression methods, where several candidate models are tuned using an exhaustive grid search algorithm approach and k-fold crossvalidation. The tuned models are fitted and evaluated against a test set of data to determine a single best performing model using a multiple scorer performance index as the metric. The resulting performance index suggests that the decision tree model is the most suitable regressor for capacity estimation due to this model exhibiting the highest accuracy as well as lowest residual error. Moreover, this study also assessed the fragility of the bridge piers subjected to mainshock-only and mainshock-aftershock earthquakes. Probabilistic seismic demand models (PSDMs) are derived for the columns designed using current PBD guidelines (PBD-compliant) to evaluate whether the current PBD criteria is sufficient for resisting aftershock effects. Additional PSDMs are generated for the columns with inadequate transverse reinforcement (PBD-deficient) to assess aftershock vulnerability of older bridges. The developed fragility curves indicate an increased fragility of all bridge piers for all damage levels. The findings indicate that adequate aftershock performance is achieved for bridge piers designed to current (2019) CHBDC extensive damage level criteria. Furthermore, it is suggested that minimal damage performance criteria need to be developed for aftershock effects, and the repairable damage level be reintroduced for major route bridges.

Effect of Directionality of Multi-component Ground Motions on Bridge Fragility Curves

Effect of Directionality of Multi-component Ground Motions on Bridge Fragility Curves
Author: Marco Torbol
Publisher:
Total Pages: 123
Release: 2011
Genre:
ISBN: 9781124522074

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This dissertation focuses on developing, evaluating and testing a new approach to seismic risk assessment of highway transportation networks. Throughout the years many researches have been conducted on each different step used in this dissertation. Most of these steps use a probabilistic approach for each single problem; Monte Carlo simulation is the brute force approach used by this dissertation, however some assumptions throughout the process were necessary to achieve results that could be useful to the final user, decision maker. When dealing with the damageability of an infrastructure network, it is necessary to start from the study of the damageability of each vulnerable component. For highway transportation networks subject to a seismic event bridges are the vulnerable component. With enough time, enough information and enough manpower the best approach is step by step: to build an analytical model for each bridge, to perform probabilistic seismic hazard analysis PSHA at each bridge site and to assess the seismic vulnerability of each bridge. Unfortunately, when dealing with large networks, bridges are present in hundreds or even thousands (LA-OC network has more than 3000 bridges; therefore subdivision in classes and prototyping of each class is necessary to reduce the problem to a more manageable dimension. a single prototype that represents its entire class is analyzed and its damageability is applied to the entire class. Fragility curves will be used to represents the bridges' damageability. Different contributions are developed in this dissertation; the fundamental one is the development of fragility curves with two uni-variate random variables. The first will be the Intensity Measure of the ground motion; the second will be the angle of seismic incidence from which the ground motion struck the structure. Bridges with the same damageability class, located at different places within the network will behave differently under the same earthquake scenario, even if the intensity measure is the same, because of their different axis orientation and angle of seismic incidence. Therefore the spatial distribution properties of the network are taken into account when performing SRA. The development of a new software was necessary for the application of these new fragility curves to the SRA of highway transportation networks.

The Response of Long-Span Bridges to Low Frequency, Near-Fault Earthquake Ground Motions

The Response of Long-Span Bridges to Low Frequency, Near-Fault Earthquake Ground Motions
Author:
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2009
Genre:
ISBN:

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Historical seismic hazard characterizations did not include earthquake ground motion waveforms at frequencies below approximately 0.2 Hz (5 seconds period). This resulted from limitations in early strong motion instrumentation and signal processing techniques, a lack of measurements in the near-field of major earthquakes and therefore no observational awareness, and a delayed understanding in the engineering community of the potential significance of these types of motions. In recent years, there is a growing recognition of the relevance of near-fault, low frequency motions, particularly for long-period structures such as large bridges. This paper describes a computationally based study of the effects of low frequency (long-period) near-fault motions on long-span bridge response. The importance of inclusion of these types of motions for long span cable supported bridges is demonstrated using actual measured broad-band, near-fault motions from large earthquakes.