Effect of bonding or unbonding on seismic behavior of bridge elastomeric bearings: lessons learned from past earthquakes in China and Japan and inspirations for future design

Abstract

Economical laminated elastomeric bearings are well-adopted options for load transmission components of bridges from superstructure to substructure. In most cases, the design of such elastomeric bearings primarily depends on the requirements from service-level conditions such as superstructure thermal movements, with little consideration of extreme loads like earthquakes. However, bridge elastomeric bearings are very likely to be subjected to earthquake hazards, particularly for bridges located in high seismic regions. This study presents an overview of the observed typical damages of bridge elastomeric bearings in the past major earthquakes mainly in China and Japan. Comparisons of different damage patterns are conducted based on the different installations of bridge elastomeric bearings (bonding or un-bonding). The effect of bearing installation methods on the overall seismic behavior of bridges is also discussed. A desirable installation method for bridge elastomeric bearings against strong earthquake loads is recommended, which is expected to overcome the critical limitations of current design practice.

Investigation of the Earthquake Content in Social Studies Coursebooks within the Scope of Middle School Students' Views

“…In the literature review, it was found that the earthquake related content in coursebooks was analyzed both in Türkiye (Duman Kocabaş, 2011;Kırıkkaya, Ünver and Çakın, 2011;Kılıç, 2019;Önal, 2019;Değirmenci, Kuzey and Yetişensoy, 2019;Karaca, 2022) and in the world (Morrisey, 2004;Izadkhah and Hosseini, 2005;Komac, Zorn and Ciglič, 2013;Hayashi, 2014;Seddighi et al, 2021;Li et al 2022, Seddighi et al, 2022 as part of the topic of general disasters. Both in Türkiye and in different countries around the world [Japan (Satake, 2015), USA (Gerstenberger et al, 2005), Philippines (Ong et al, 2021), China (Xiang et al, 2021), Taiwan (Chao et al, 2020), India (Hazarika and Kayal, 2022), Greece (Bonatis et al, 2022), Romania (Micu, Micu and Havenith, 2023), Canada (Eyre et al, 2022), Germany (Sach, Buchner and Schmeiden, 2020), Finland (Veikkolainen et al, 2021) etc.] earthquakes take place sometimes and negatively affect daily life.…”

Multimodal seismic assessment of infrastructures retrofitted with exoskeletons: insights from the Foggia Airport case study

“…Recent seismic events have underscored the fragility of infrastructures in seismically active regions (Kawashima et al 2009;Pang et al 2020;Xiang et al 2021;Salkhordeh et al 2021). Many infrastructures were built before the adoption of contemporary European and International seismic guidelines (Wardhana and Hadipriono 2003;Afsar Dizaj et al 2023;Zucca et al 2023), leading to high seismic vulnerability (Wallace et al 2001;Yen 2002).…”

Investigations into Nonlinear Effects of Normal Pressures on Dynamic Cyclic Responses of Novel 3D-Printed TPMS Bridge Bearings

“…Nevertheless, common bridge bearings are still likely to have a bulging behaviour under compression and to experience the stress concentrations at the edges of interactions between reinforcement and rubber layers. In a case of a fully bonded bridge bearing, if the cyclic demands of bearing exceed a certain capacity limit, the bearing failure will be initiated, resulting in the internal rupture of the bearing, which begins to propagate towards until the entire delamination [13]. These two phenomena might cause the bridge to fail immediately if their design is insufficient under compression and cyclic condition.…”

“…In this paper, only the cyclic response of a fully bonded bridge bearing is considered. According to a review in [13], there are two major reasons to investigate the proposed model for a fully bonded installation: One is because under extreme cyclic loading, the bearings with a fully bonded installation, among others, are most useful to restrain the deformations of the superstructure due to the fully high capacity of their shear stiffness. Another reason is that these fully bonded connections of bridge bearings are very compatible with any steel bridges, which are widely used due to highly economic costs, facilitating the mechanical connections between the bearings and bridges.…”