Seismic Performance of Steel Bridge Piers Corroded at Corners and Bottoms for Several Earthquake Motions

Abstract

AbstractCorrosion damage on steel bridge piers has been observed at the corners where the coating tends to be thin and at the bottoms where stagnant rainwater tends to be generated. The further progress of such corrosion damage results in degradation of the seismic performance of the piers. Nevertheless, there have been very few studies on the seismic performance of steel bridge piers considering the effect of corrosion damage. In this study, the seismic response analyses by the nonlinear finite element models are carried out to investigate the seismic response behavior of the steel bridge piers with corrosion damage at the corners and bottoms. The objective of this study is to understand the influence of the corrosion damage location, corrosion damage ratio, and uncertainty in the input ground motions on the load‐carrying capacity of steel bridge piers. As a result, it is found that the maximum displacements increase and the maximum loadings decrease as corrosion damage progresses. Moreover, the change rates in the maximum displacements and maximum loadings are affected by changes in the natural periods of the target piers due to corrosion damage and by the frequency properties of the input ground motions.