FE ANALYSES OF EXPERIMENTS FOR SHEAR PROPERTIES OF RUBBER BEARINGS WITH PARAMETERS OF AXIAL STRESS PARAMETERS AND EVALUATION OF LOCAL INTERNAL STRESS OF RUBBER BEARINGS

Abstract

 Couple of rubber bearing supports on highway bridges were damaged by 2011 Tohoku Pacific Off- shore Earthquake and 2016 Kumamoto Earthquake in Japan. Even though the seismic design method for the rubber bearing support has been developed by a lot of experimental and analytical studies since 1995 Kobe Earthquake in Japan, the shear properties of the rubber bearing support with a tensile axial force has not been identified due to lack of related studies. In our past study, in order to investigate the shear properties of the rubber bearing supports (RB) with a tensile axial force, cyclic loading tests varied with axial forces of RB test specimens were conducted. In the tests, using 4 test specimens with same specification, 6MPa compressive stress, 0MPa, 1MPa tensile stress and 2MPa tensile stress as the axial stress were loaded on each test specimen. Here in, in order to evaluate the local internal stress of the rubber bearing supports subjected to a tensile axial force and a shear force, FE analyses considered the hyperelastic and viscoelastic properties of a rubber material were conducted. After verifying the reproducibility for the experiments by the analyses, the local stress states of the rubber bearing supports were investigated. By the analyses varied with axial forces, the stress distributions of the rubber bearing supports were investigated.