Abstract
Uncertainty quantification is an important issue in the seismic fragility analysis of bridge type structures. However, the influence of different sources of uncertainty on the seismic fragility of the system is commonly overlooked due to the costly re-evaluation of numerical model simulations. This paper aims to present a framework for the seismic fragility analysis of reinforced concrete highway bridges, where a data-driven metamodel is developed to approximate the structural response to structural and ground motion uncertainties. The proposed framework to generate fragility curves shows its efficiency while using a few finite element simulations and accounting for various modeling uncertainties influencing the bridge seismic fragility. In this respect, a class of single-bent bridges available in the literature is taken as a case study, whose three-dimensional finite element model is established by the OpenSees software framework. Twenty near-source records from different sources are selected and the Latin hypercube method is applied for generating the random samples of modeling and ground motion parameters. The Kriging metamodel is then driven on the structural response obtained from nonlinear time history analyses. Component fragility curves of the reinforced concrete pier column are derived for different damage states using the Kriging metamodel whose parameters are established considering different modeling parameters generated by Monte Carlo simulations. The results demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed framework in interpolating the structural response and deriving the fragility curve of the case study with any input conditions of the random variables.
Highlights
Seismic vulnerability is often represented in the form of fragility curve, which is an important decision support tool to identify the potential seismic risk in the framework of performance-based earthquake engineering (PBEE)
This paper presented a computationally efficient framework for the seismic fragility evaluation of a class of reinforced concrete (RC) highway bridges
By application to a case study of typical single-bent RC highway bridges, this framework offered a limited of simulations to obtain seismic fragility curves of the bridge class and showed its capacity in rapidly predicting fragility curves for different input conditions of the random variables without re-construction and re-evaluation of the numerical model simulation
Summary
Seismic vulnerability is often represented in the form of fragility curve, which is an important decision support tool to identify the potential seismic risk in the framework of performance-based earthquake engineering (PBEE). This study aims to discuss in detail a computationally efficient framework for the seismic fragility evaluation of a class of RC highway bridges based on a Krigingbased surrogate model and its flexibility in generating fragility curves for different input conditions of the modeling parameters. To reach this goal, a class of typical single-column bent RC highway bridge is selected, whose material and geometry properties are considered to be random variables.
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