A new seismic design method of simply supported girder bridges for very rare ground motions in the transverse direction

Abstract

In most seismic design codes, usually two seismic hazard levels are taken into account, for example, Design Earthquake and Maximum Considered Earthquake. Several disastrous earthquakes have proved that seismic safety evaluation may underestimate seismic risks, which would result in serious damage of bridge structures. Therefore, a new higher level of seismic hazard named Very Rare Ground Motion (VRGM for short) is proposed innovatively to be considered in this paper for very important bridges. A novel seismic design method of simply supported girder bridges in the transverse direction for VRGMs is proposed at first. In the proposed method, seismic isolation bearings, tension-only braces and ductile piers are combined to improve the seismic performance and meet seismic requirements of VRGMs. Taking a simply supported girder bridge as a numerical analysis example, the proposed method is compared with two bridge seismic design methods adopted in current seismic codes and its parametric analysis is conducted. It’s shown that the proposed seismic design method can combine the ductility capacities of piers and the functions of seismic isolation bearings and reduce all the concerned structural seismic responses in VRGMs effectively. This work provides an educational demonstration for engineers dealing with similar problems.