Bridge design should take into account not only safety and functionality, but also thecost effectiveness of investments throughout a bridge life-cycle. This work presents aprobabilistic approach to compute the life-cycle cost (LCC) of corroding reinforcedconcrete (RC) bridges in earthquake prone regions. The approach is developed bycombining cumulative seismic damage and damage associated to corrosion due toenvironmental conditions. Cumulative seismic damage is obtained from a low-cyclefatigue analysis. Chloride-induced corrosion of steel reinforcement is computed basedon Fick?s second law of diffusion.The proposed methodology accounts for the uncertainties in the ground motionparameters, the distance from source, the seismic demand on the bridge, and thecorrosion initiation time. The statistics of the accumulated damage and the cost ofrepairs throughout the bridge life-cycle are obtained by Monte-Carlo simulation. As anillustration of the proposed approach, the effect of design parameters on the life-cyclecost of an example RC bridge is studied. The results are shown to be valuable in betterestimating the condition of existing bridges (i.e., total accumulated damage at any giventime) and, therefore, can help schedule inspection and maintenance programs. In addition, by taking into consideration the deterioration process over a bridge life-cycle, itis possible to make an estimate of the optimum design parameters by minimizing, forexample, the expected cost throughout the life of the structure.
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