Results also show that due to the superior energy dissipation capacity of SMA-LRBs, such smart bearings can considerably improve the seismic performance of piers in terms of base shear.
The variations of design limit parameters in the two modes of change to pier length and diameter including the applied load, top settlement, stiffness modulus and pier modulus, in terms of the slenderness ratio, make a linear function while the variations of load and settlement ratio show an exponential function.
New relationships have been proposed to predict the effect of drift accumulation on bridge pier scour, both in terms of relative maximum scour and temporal scour evolution.
The seismic vulnerability of a bridge pier is generally expressed in terms of fragility curves, which reveal the conditional probability of exceeding a predefined performance damage state at different levels of earthquake intensities.
Several options in terms of pier effective heights, spandrel effective length, size/stiffness of spandrel pier overlapping zones, and reduction of elastic properties have been tested against experimental and numerical results.
Figure 10 shows the time history response of the rocking pier during these last, particularly intense, excitations in terms of deck drift, foundation settlement, and deck acceleration.
(3) Counterintuitively, the rocking-isolated pier was found to be advantageous also in terms of drift demands suffering comparatively lower deck displacements in all of the studied loading cases.
An additional aspect of this work is that the wall piers in the CCW were significantly different in terms of their dynamic and geometric properties: the moments of inertia of the two wall piers of the CCW differed by almost an order of magnitude.
The impact of various parameters is evaluated under probability point of view in terms of its influence on the bridge pier fragility curve.
Time history technique is utilized to analyze and compare the response of a dual system structure against seismic loadings in terms of maximum story displacement, base reaction, pier moment, story acceleration and story shear.
