doi:10.3850/978-981-08-7920-4_S2-S108-cd

ABSTRACT

In the Mid Niigata Prefecture Earthquake in 2004, the damage of a bridge pier was found mitigated by the collision between the girder and the abutment. In the seismic response analysis, it is thus important to include the effect of collision. A simple and practical method of simulating collision in the numerical analysis is the introduction of a spring where the collision occurs. However, the constant of such a collision spring is yet to be formulated well. In this study, an appropriate collision-spring constant is therefore investigated for simulating the collisions between girders and between a girder and an abutment. A small collision-spring constant tends to cause the large overlap of colliding bodies while a large collision-spring constant tends to cause many fictitious collisions during the real collision. Various girder–girder-collision and abutment-girder-collision models are analyzed, based on which formulas for the collisionspring constants are proposed. The response analysis of a bridge under seismic loading is then conducted to see the effect of collision.

Keywords: Seismic response, Bridge, Girder–girder collision, Abutment-girder collision, Collisionspring, Collision-spring constant.

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