Limited Ductility of H-Shaped Cable-Stayed Bridge Tower

Abstract:

Large transverse dynamic responses will occur in the tower columns due to the lateral restriction between the tower and the main girder of the cable stayed bridge subjected to strong ground motions. In the current seismic design of cable-stayed bridges, a larger reinforcement ratio in tower columns is consequently needed to achieve the target seismic performance, leading to the increase in the number of the piles and its reinforcement ratio as well, whose engineering efficiency is therefore questionable. An incremental dynamic analysis(IDA) was conducted to study the lateral elastic-plastic perform and damage mechanism of the H-shaped concrete tower. The finite element analysis and quasi-static test were conducted to verify the IDA result and investigate the limited ductility of the tower in resisting the earthquake and to find out the reasonable performance objective and index.

Key words:cable-stayed bridge; tower; limited-ductility; quasi-static test; earthquake