EXPERIMENTAL STUDY ON THE SEISMIC RESISTANCE PERFORMANCE OF RECTANGULAR CROSS SECTION STEEL BRIDGE PIERS SUBJECTED TO BI-DIRECTIONAL HORIZONTAL LOADS

Abstract

Since the Great Kobe earthquake in 1995, the seismic design of infrastructures in Japan was revised greatly in many items. But as far as the bridge piers are concerned, the design concept based on the conventional single directional seismic force has remained, not taking into account the actual bidirectional horizontal seismic forces. In this study, the strength and ductility of rectangular cross section steel bridge piers subjected to bi-directional horizontal forces are investigated experimentally in order to provide the basic information to establish the rational design rules. As the first stage of this research, the actual seismic response is idealized into several simple histeretic loading patterns, such as linear, circle, oval, radial, square and octagon types. The different seismic performances are obtained according to these loading patterns.