Feasibility Studies for Improving Caltrans Bridge Fragility Relationships. Final Report

摘要

The primary focus of this feasibility investigation was to demonstrate that improved fragility models could be developed for use in emergency alerting applications such as ShakeCast. Part I of this report is the Ph.D. thesis of Karthik Ramanathan which forms the core of this effort. Its goal was to complete an initial end-to-end iteration through the entire model-development process for a representative range of bridge classes. Part IV provides amendments to Part I stemming from Caltrans revisions to damage state definitions which occurred after thesis defense. Part V provides supplemental discussion, by the project principal investigators, of initial key findings and impacts on future research. A secondary, parallel, focus of this feasibility investigation was to explore the potential of using comparable methods to support the design of new bridges. Part II of this report presents work primarily by Jazalyn Dukes on the development of a pilot bridge-specific design-support tool to allow bridge engineers to examine risk implications of altering key design variables. Finally, as purely analytical methods were employed throughout this study, an early feasibility task was to demonstrate that the computational methods employed herein could reasonably reproduce observations from instrumented bridges. Part III of this report summarizes model/method validation work.