Seismic investigation of cyclic pushover method for regular reinforced concrete bridge

Abstract

Inelastic static pushover analysis has been used in the academic-research widely for seismic analysis of structures. Nowadays, the variety pushover analysis methods have been developed, including Modal pushover, Adaptive pushover, and Cyclic pushover, in which some weaknesses of the conventional pushover method have been rectified. In the conventional pushover analysis method, the effects of cumulative growth of cracks are not considered on the reduction of strength and stiffness of RC members that occur during earthquake or cyclic loading. Therefore, the Cyclic Pushover Analysis Method (CPA) has been proposed. This method is a powerful technique for seismic evaluation of regular reinforced concrete buildings in which the first mode of them is dominant. Since the bridges have different structures than buildings, their results cannot necessarily be attributed to bridges, and more research is needed. In this study, a cyclic pushover analysis with four loading protocols (suggested by valid references) by the Opensees software was conducted for seismic evaluation of two regular reinforce concrete bridges. The modeling method was validated with the comparison of the analytical and experimental results under both cyclic and dynamic loading. The failure mode of the piers was considered in two-mode of flexural failure and also a flexural-shear failure. Along with the cyclic analysis, conventional analysis has been studied. Also, the nonlinear incremental dynamic analysis (IDA) method has been used to examine and compare the results of pushover analyses. The time history of 20 far-field earthquake records was used to conduct IDA. After analysis, the base shear vs. displacement in the middle of the deck was drawn. The obtained results show that the cyclic pushover analysis method is able to evaluate an accurate seismic behavior of the reinforced concrete piers of the bridges. Based on the results, the cyclic pushover has proper convergence with IDA. Its accuracy was much higher than the conventional pushover, in which the bridge piers failed in flexural-shear mode. But, in the flexural failure mode, the results of each two pushover methods were close approximately. Besides, the cyclic pushover method with ACI loading protocol, and ATC-24 loading protocol, can provided more accurate results for evaluating the seismic investigation of the bridges, specially if the bridge piers are failed in flexural-shear failure mode.