IMPROVEMENT OF SIMPLE EVALUATION METHOD FOR DUCTILE CRACK INITIATION IN STIFFENED BOX-SECTIONAL STEEL BRIDGE PIERS BY PUSHOVER ANALYSIS

Abstract

This study is aimed at improving a simple method for evaluating ductile crack initiation in stiffened box-sectional steel bridge piers by employing the pushover analysis. Following an idea presented in a previous paper, a new modification factor is proposed to obtain the critical ductile crack initiation strain at structural level, which will be used as a failure criterion in the simple evaluation method. Comparisons with results from the shell analysis show that the advanced method is of almost the same accuracy as a pushover analysis-based method in the previous paper. Moreover, its applicability is verified by experimental results.