Abstract
We investigated the effect of pier base restraint on the ultimate behavior of bridge piers subject to severe earthquake motions. For this purpose, we implemented our pier-base connection model referred to as ‘a semi-empirical model’ in the nonlinear dynamic analysis for steel piers. From this numerical analysis, it is observed that the reduction of pier base restraint decreases the damage to steel pier but increases the damage to anchor bolts. Therefore, there exists an optimum pier base restraint that minimizes the maximum response displacement and residual displacement. For the design purpose, we discussed a necessary pier base moment capacity where the damage to pier base will not exceed that to steel pier. Furthermore, we examined the applicability of the static analysis based on the Newmark's energy conservation principle as an alternative to the nonlinear dynamic response analysis.
