Abstract
This paper investigated seismic design methods in consideration of earthquake-induced repetitive pounding in adjacent railway RC viaducts. Detailed pounding simulation revealed that when the over-hanging slab pounding occurs, the coefficient of restitution decreases by about 0.2 due to the conversion to the wave energy propagation into superstructures, and decreases by about 0.6 at the maximum due to the conversion to the energy consumption derived from the material nonlinear hysteresis. A simple contact model has been developed for evaluating the wave energy propagation component and the hysteresis energy component by a dashpot and a nonlinear spring, respectively. Overall analyses using this contact model showed that the response displacement of the structure may increase up to 70% at the maximum. Based on the findings, three methods were proposed for estimating response increases and the gap between structures: a simplified formula, pounding energy method, and simple contact model.
