Study on the Seismic Vulnerability of a Viaduct Subjected to Near-Fault Ground Motions

Abstract

Piers, abutments and bearings of viaducts may suffer severe damage during earthquakes, so it's not insufficient to evaluate the seismic vulnerability of a bridge system only by plastic hinge curvature, which is adopted in seismic design guidelines. In this paper, the seismic vulnerability evaluation of a viaduct is conducted by incremental dynamic analysis under 30 near-fault ground motions, which are selected from PEER database. Then several damage measures are recommended to make an overall estimation for the seismic vulnerability of the viaduct, including plastic hinge curvature, shear failure and sliding displacement failure of bearings and pounding force between abutments and the girder. The analysis results show that the transversal seismic excitations may lead to more severe damage than the longitudinal ground motions. No matter in which direction the ground motions are inputted, the bearings' seismic vulnerability resulted by shear force or sliding displacement is higher than the plastic hinge of piers, which indicates that the seismic vulnerability of the bridge system is determined by the bearings to an extent. As a result, bearings should be designed according to both static and seismic analyses to guarantee the safety during earthquakes.