“…At the same time, other researchers also found that the characters of abutments backfill, the size and pre-drilling filler of piles, etc., had a significant influence on the performance of abutments and bridge girders [7,11,12]. Compared with traditional bridges, the connections among piles, abutment and bridge girder are required to secure sufficient stiffness, rotational stiffness, and bearing strength for integral abutment ones [13], hence, a modified Ramberg-Osgood cyclic model was introduced to obtain the tangent stiffness of the nonlinear spring elements in integral abutment bridges for studying the piling stresses and pile-soil interaction [14]. In addition, due to the removal of expansion joints, parametric study and stress analysis on the thermal response of integral abutment bridges were also researched [15,16].…”