Seismic Integrity of a Long Span Bridge with Tower-Deck Buffers

摘要

The wind action is acknowledged to be the primary environmental load in the design of suspension bridges. It affects both the performance of safety and serviceability. Nevertheless, the impact of earthquakes cannot be neglected especially when the construction site is located in a high seismicity region. The evaluation of the vulnerability of a suspension bridge requires a hazard analysis on the site, the definition of the seismic intensity related to the desired return periods, the generation of artificial signals for the reference site and the collection of critical records for integrity analyses,. The signals will then be used in the structural analyses for the verification of structural safety and structural robustness. This paper is focused on the generation of these critical signals, with their own a-synchronicity, and the associated numerical nonlinear analyses, which must be conducted in the time domain.