A Study on the Mechanism of Impact between Curved Bridge Segments Using Nonsmooth Dynamics

Abstract

It has been observed in many previous earthquakes that impact often occurs between the main girders in curved bridges. An earthquake can result in deck-unseating leading to catastrophic destruction of the structure. In this paper, the nonsmooth multirigid body dynamics method and the set-valued formulation were used to model and analyze the mechanism of impact between the curved bridge segments. The analysis demonstrated that these impacts are the major cause of segment rotation. The main contribution of this paper is to use Newton’s impact law and Coulomb’s friction law to describe the interaction between the curved bridge segments in the form of a set-valued function and to express impacts with friction as a linear complementary problem. For frictionless and frictional contact, the paper considers the single-point and multipoint impacts using the linear complementary formula to detect the unique actual slip-stick conditions of these states. A variety of criteria for distinguishing each case are presented and the results provide the kinetic characteristics of each contact case. The analysis has shown that the impact between the segments of a curved bridge and the tendency of the segments to rotate (and thus detach) are related to the overall geometry, the coefficient of restitution, the coefficient of friction, and the preimpact conditions in the plane of motion. Finally, a theoretical relationship diagram of the impact, rotation slip, and stick condition of the curved bridge segments at the contact point is given. The presented results will be useful for the seismic design of curved bridges.

Seismic performance of continuous curved girder bridge with high pier in Maduo earthquake and characteristic analysis

“…The near-fault pulse-type ground motion will increase the collision possibility and impact effect of the curved beam bridge. The impact of near-fault pulsed ground motions should be considered in the analysis of collision effects (Li et al, 2020). In this earthquake, a total of 16 sets of strong earthquake records were collected.…”

Impact of Near-Fault Ground Motions on Longitudinal Seismic Response of CHRF Bridges

“…where K h is the pounding stiffness of the Hertz-damp model. The pounding stiffness is equal to the first-order modal stiffness of the bridge, which can be calculated based on previous studies [19,25]. δ m is the maximum intrusion displacement between the two contact surfaces.…”

“…They thought that the pounding significantly affected the bending moments of the piers and the transverse relative displacements between the deck and the abutment. Xu et al [25,26] studied the pounding effect and its influence on curved bridges with a small radius and a longitudinal slope subjected to near-fault ground motions. They found that pounding responses were significantly influenced by the characteristics of excitation, the peak pounding forces under bidirectional excitation were more significant, and the pounding force near the short pier was greater than that of the tall pier.…”

Non-smooth dynamic analysis of curved bridges considering the earthquake-induced end-pounding

“…Shi and Dimitrakopoulos [32] assessed and compared the capacity of the non-smooth approach and force-based approaches to simulate the seismic response of a case study straight bridge. Additionally, Banerjee et al [33] and Li et al [34] calculated the complex dynamic behavior of pounding between a curved beam and an abutment or an adjacent beam. Banerjee et al [35] simulated the pounding between a curved beam and an abutment and investigated the ideal combination of the column and bent arrangement and the gap distance.…”