Fragility Analysis on Transversal Isolation System for Outer Piers of Long Span Bridges

Abstract:

In common design of long span bridges, dead load on outer piers was much smaller than that on inner piers. As a result, under seismic excitation, energy dissipation for friction pendulum bearings on outer piers was not effective. In this regard, a new transversal isolation system consisting of a hysteretic damper and sliding bearing was proposed. After that, the effectivity of this system was validated by a modern steel trussed arch bridge using fragility function. Displacement of sliding bearings, bending moment of outer piers and stress on the arch springing were taken as the engineering demand parameters. Cloud method was applied to build the probabilistic demand seismic model. The generated fragility curves show that the proposed transversal isolation system performs quite well under potential earthquakes.

Key words:bridge outer pier; transversal isolation system; hysteretic damper; fragility analysis; damage indices