Updating the Seismic Reliability of Existing RC Bridge Piers in an Aggressive Environment using Ground Motion Information

Abstract eng:
Little attention has been devoted to the assessment of the seismic reliability of corroded structures. For the life-cycle assessment of RC structures in a marine environment and earthquake-prone regions, the effect of corrosion due to airborne chlorides on the seismic capacity needs to be taken into consideration. In addition, for existing structures, epistemic uncertainties involved in the evaluation of hazard assessment associated with airborne chloride, corrosion process of steel bars, and deterioration of seismic capacity have to be reduced using observational information (Akiyama et al. 2010, Frangopol 2011). This paper presents a procedure to estimate the seismic reliability of existing RC bridge piers in a marine environment updated by using Sequential Monte Carlo Simulation. When estimating the failure probability, the occurrence of buckling of corroded longitudinal rebars is considered as the sole limit state. In this procedure, visual inspection data and seismic ground motion measured near the bridges analyzed are used as observational information. The earthquake event can provide a proof test of the bridge. Based on this test, random variables used in seismic capacity evaluation and corrosion process of rebars due to chloride attack are updated. The effects of visual inspection results and magnitude of measured ground motion on the updated estimates of the seismic reliability of a RC bridge pier are discussed by using an illustrative example.

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