Project Title
Life-Cycle Seismic Resilience Assessment of Reinforced Concrete Bridges in Aggressive Environments
Researcher
Dr. Xianming Shi (PI)
Dr. Jie Zhao (Co-PI)
Project Description
Reinforced concrete (RC) bridges in seismic-prone areas may experience multiple earthquakes during their service periods. The exposure of RC bridges in aggressive environments can exacerbate structural deteriorations and reduce their capacity to withstand seismic events. In the meantime, structural damages due to earthquakes may increase the exposure of reinforced steel to aggressive environments and expedite the chloride-induced corrosion processes. Thus, a comprehensive understanding of the interactions of the effects of corrosion and seismic events on structural deterioration is very important to provide a realistic assessment of bridge life-cycle resilience. However, most existing studies have mainly estimated the effect of corrosion-induced deterioration on structural capacity against hazards. While it is really necessary, the impacts of structural damages following earthquakes on the time-dependent corrosion processes have not been investigated in any depth. Moreover, small magnitude earthquakes with high-probability may continuously affect the processes of deterioration for RC bridges, which has been ignored in existing studies. In this context, this project contributes to filling the research gaps by proposing a comprehensive interdisciplinary framework that combines the structural damages due to seismic events and theexposure to non-uniform corrosion for RC bridges. First, the probability seismic hazard analysis (PSHA) is utilized to generate a stochastic set of seismic events with multiple levels of magnitudes and the ground motions at the bridge location of interest. Then, the time-dependent bridge deterioration model is developed by incorporating the interaction of the effects of corrosion and seismic event on structural behaviors, and subsequently used for the assessment of life-cycle resilience. Finally, a RC bridge in Seattle, WA is applied as the case study to illustrate this proposed framework. By doing so, the proposed framework can provide a more realistic resilience assessment for RC bridges under the combined effects of corrosion and seismic event, which can help bridge managers to determine effective resilience-enhancing strategies in long-term development planning.
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