The aim of this research is to investigate the effect of different degrees of corrosion on the ultimate strength, ductility and failure mode of Reinforced Concrete (RC) bridge piers subject to earthquake loading using experimental and analytical studies on medium scale bridge piers at the Earthquake Engineering Research Centre (EERC) of the University of Bristol. The experimental studies in this project have three stages: a) testing of corroded reinforcement to investigate the effect of corrosion on the nonlinear stress-strain behaviour of reinforcing bars under monotonic and cyclic loading, b) monotonic compression tests on corrosion damaged well-confined RC short columns to investigate the effect of corrosion on confined concrete behaviour and the overall stability of corroded bars under high compression loads in the column and c) reaction wall tests on scaled bridge piers to investigate the response of corrosion damaged bridge piers subject to cyclic loading. Based on the experimental tests at stages (a) and (b) new constitutive material models are being developed to take into account the effect of long-term material deterioration. Finally these material models will be incorporated in the numerical simulation of experimental tests at stage (c) by developing a multi-mechanical nonlinear finite element code using fibre-section discretization technique. A selection of the experimental results of the monotonic tests on the corroded reinforcing bars in tension and compression (including buckling) and its effect on inelastic section response (moment-curvature) of corrosion damaged RC bridge piers are reported in this paper.
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