On estimating the reduction factor of bridge piers

Abstract

Estimating the reduction factor for calculating massive reinforced concrete bridge piers was made. For this purpose a quasi-static “force-displacement” diagram was built up using the ANSYS software. This diagram has the form of a bilinear one, and the character of the bilinearity depends on the diameter of the reinforcing bars insignificantly. The percentage of reinforcement affects only the moment when all reinforcement bars begin to flow. The reinforcement flow takes place in the displacement interval from 3 to 5 cm. The collapse will occur when the reaction of the bearing part goes beyond the pier cross-section at pier displacements from 5 to 20 cm. Using “force-displacement” diagram, the behavior of the single-mass model with a bilinear deformation diagram and the limit displacement of 20 cm was analyzed. Then, it became possible to obtain for each accelerogram the limit elastic displacement and the limit position of the point corresponding to the maximum structure displacement during structure oscillations. It was done using real accelerograms of earthquakes with intensity 9 on the MSK scale without normalizing their amplitudes. In this case, long-period accelerograms had smaller peak accelerations, but resulted in greater plastic deformations. As a result, no evident dependence of plastic deformation on the input spectral composition was found and the value of reduction factor K1 turned out to be 0.25-0.27. However, it is shown that this reduction factor cannot be used to make transition from seismic loads obtained on the basis of time-history analysis by accelerograms to design loads.