Importance of performance based design for piled bridge abutments on soft clay

摘要

This paper deals with the displacement of piled bridge ; hutments constructed on very soft clay layers. Such abutments have tended to lose the serviceability due to the excessive deformation of the soil. There-fore, estimating the abutment displacement has been one of the most important aspects in the actual designs. In this paper, three case studies of piled bridge abutments which were designed by different concepts are introduced in view of the encountered problems and the related countermeasures. Necessity of long-term observation after the end of the construction is also discussed, which enables to make the further maintenance more effective. A new simple approach to estimate the abutment displacement is proposed based on the two non-dimensional values, and the validity of the approach is examined through a series of contrifuge modeling and the case studies.