Summary A new floor connecting system developed for low‐damage seismic‐resistant building structures is described herein. The system, termed Inertial Force‐Limiting Floor Anchorage System (IFAS), is intended to limit the lateral forces in buildings during an earthquake. This objective is accomplished by providing limited‐strength deformable connections between the floor system and the primary elements of the lateral force‐resisting system. The connections transform the seismic demands from inertial forces into relative displacements between the floors and lateral force‐resisting system. This paper presents the IFAS performance in a shake‐table testing program that provides a direct comparison with an equivalent conventional rigidly anchored‐floor structure. The test structure is a half‐scale, 4‐story reinforced concrete flat‐plate shear wall structure. Precast hybrid rocking walls and special precast columns were used for test repeatability in a 22‐input strong ground‐motion sequence. The structure was purposely designed with an eccentric wall layout to examine the performance of the system in coupled translational‐torsional response. The test results indicated a seismic demand reduction in the lateral force‐resisting system of the IFAS structure relative to the conventional structure, including reduced shear wall base rotation, shear wall and column inter‐story drift, and, in some cases, floor accelerations. These results indicate the potential for the IFAS to minimize damage to the primary structural and non‐structural components during earthquakes.
Considering the importance of the transportation network and bridge structures, the associated seismic design philosophy is shifting from the basic collapse prevention objective to maintaining functionality on the community scale in the aftermath of moderate to strong earthquakes (i.e., resiliency). In addition to performance, the associated construction philosophy is also being modernized, with the utilization of accelerated bridge construction (ABC) techniques to reduce impacts of construction work on traffic, society, economy, and on-site safety during construction. Recent years have seen several developments towards the design of low-damage bridges and ABC. According to the results of conducted tests, these systems have significant potential to achieve the intended community resiliency objectives. Taking advantage of such potential in the standard design and analysis processes requires proper modeling that adequately characterizes the behavior and response of these bridge systems. To evaluate the current practices and abilities of the structural engineering community to model this type of resiliency-oriented bridges, the Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center (PEER) organized a blind prediction contest of a two-column bridge bent consisting of columns with enhanced response characteristics achieved by a well-balanced contribution of self-centering, rocking, and energy dissipation. The parameters of this blind prediction competition are described in this report, and the predictions submitted by different teams are analyzed. In general, forces are predicted better than displacements. The post-tension bar forces and residual displacements are predicted with the best and least accuracy, respectively. Some of the predicted quantities are observed to have coefficient of variation (COV) values larger than 50%; however, in general, the scatter in the predictions amongst different teams is not significantly large. Applied ground motions (GM) in shaking table tests consisted of a series of naturally recorded earthquake acceleration signals, where GM1 is found to be the largest contributor to the displacement error for most of the teams, and GM7 is the largest contributor to the force (hence, the acceleration) error. The large contribution of GM1 to the displacement error is due to the elastic response in GM1 and the errors stemming from the incorrect estimation of the period and damping ratio. The contribution of GM7 to the force error is due to the errors in the estimation of the base-shear capacity. Several teams were able to predict forces and accelerations with only moderate bias. Displacements, however, were systematically underestimated by almost every team. This suggests that there is a general problem either in the assumptions made or the models used to simulate the response of this type of bridge bent with enhanced response characteristics. Predictions of the best-performing teams were consistently and substantially better than average in all response quantities. The engineering community would benefit from learning details of the approach of the best teams and the factors that caused the models of other teams to fail to produce similarly good results. Blind prediction contests provide: (1) very useful information regarding areas where current numerical models might be improved; and (2) quantitative data regarding the uncertainty of analytical models for use in performance-based earthquake engineering evaluations. Such blind prediction contests should be encouraged for other experimental research activities and are planned to be conducted annually by PEER.
This report describes the design, construction, and shaking table response and computation simulation of a Low Seismic-Damage Bridge Bent built using Accelerated Bridge Construction methods. The proposed bent combines precast post-tensioned columns with precast foundation and bent cap to simplify off- and on-site construction burdens and minimize earthquake-induced damage and associated repair costs. Each column consists of reinforced concrete cast inside a cylindrical steel shell, which acts as the formwork, and the confining and shear reinforcement. The column steel shell is engineered to facilitate the formation of a rocking interface for concentrating the deformation demands in the columns, thereby reducing earthquake-induced damage. The precast foundation and bent cap have corrugated-metal-duct lined sockets, where the columns will be placed and grouted on-site to form the column–beam joints. Large inelastic deformation demands in the structure are concentrated at the column–beam interfaces, which are designed to accommodate these demands with minimal structural damage. Longitudinal post-tensioned high-strength steel threaded bars, designed to respond elastically, ensure re-centering behavior. Internal mild steel reinforcing bars, debonded from the concrete at the interfaces, provide energy dissipation and impact mitigation.
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