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Cumulative vulnerability assessment of highway bridges considering corrosion deterioration and repeated earthquake events

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Abstract

Civil infrastructure systems when located in high seismic zones may experience multiple earthquake events along their service life. Highway bridges that comprise critical elements of the transportation network are often exposed to harsh environments that exacerbate the structural performance to withstand such repeated shocks. While earthquake occurrences are intermittent in nature, environmental degradation mechanisms such as corrosion deterioration continually weakens the structural capacity. Presently there exists a gap in literature that simultaneously considers such temporally varying multi-hazard threats within a probabilistic framework. This study presents a novel methodology that considers repeated main shock sequences and corrosion deterioration for an index-based estimation of cumulative damage along the service life while considering the associated uncertainties with the earthquake occurrence and the deterioration process. A newly introduced analytical strategy in this study enables the updating of bridge pier section properties reflecting deterioration of an already damaged bridge between subsequent earthquake shock events. The proposed framework is demonstrated on a representative case-study multi-span continuous concrete box-girder bridge in California, United States. The results reveal a significant impact of corrosion deterioration on the seismic damage accumulation under multiple earthquakes and underlines the necessity to incorporate aging effects within bridge asset management in high seismic zones.

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Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge the financial assistance provided by the Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD), Government of India (GoI), for the research work at Indian Institute of Technology Bombay.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Civil Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Mumbai, 400076, India

    Bhaskar Panchireddi & Jayadipta Ghosh

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  1. Bhaskar Panchireddi
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  2. Jayadipta Ghosh
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Correspondence to Jayadipta Ghosh.

Appendices

Appendix A

1.1 Addition of new material definitions to the source code by modifying the OpenSees source code

Figure 14 demonstrates the procedure of adding the new materials to OpenSees by modifying the OpenSees source code using a flowchart. Existing OpenSees (McKenna et al. 2000) source code consists of predefined C++ files (with a “.cpp” extension) and an associated header file (with “.h” extension) for all material definitions. Since, Concrete04 (for modeling concrete) and HystereticMaterial (for modeling steel) are of interest, similar in the lines of already existing Concrete04 and HystereticMaterial files, this study added two new materials namely Concrete04Update and HystereticUpdate. The two new materials added are expected to have no functionality difference when compared to that of their non-updatable precursors. A thorough review on the already existing materials that have updatable parameters is performed and is concluded that the material class containing certain virtual functions of the class MovableObject defined in its associated header file (“MovableObject.h”) are the parameters that are possibly to update. Also, every parameter that can be updated in OpenSees is defined by a parameterID which must be unique in finite element domain. There exists three functions namely setParameter, updateParameter and activateParameter that are identifies as the objectives responsible for setting, updating and activating the parameter and were identified as critical components to implement the parametric updating of the material properties. These functions are defined for the new material files in their respective header files along with their definitions defined in the.cpp files. For the user to define the input of a material in OpenSees an OPS function is declared in the model builder files: TCLModelBuilderUniaxialMaterialCommand.cpp. In the header files of OPS function (i.e., “OPS.Globals.h”), the defined input functions are added to the new material files respectively and all the parameters are initialized in the constructor. The new material properties are needed to be defined in the software development files namely material.vcxproj and material.vcxproj.filters as all the material properties are being identified from these files. With all the above mentioned changes, the OpenSees source code was compiled successfully leading to a new OpenSees executable.

Fig. 14
figure 14

Flowchart outlining the addition of new materials to the OpenSees source code

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A comparison study is performed on the case-study bridge column wherein the concrete is modeled using Concret04 and Concrete04Update. The analytical response of the bridge column is tracked for both the scenarios and plotted using moment–curvature. Similar investigation was also performed on the steel properties. The moment–curvature plots of both the cases of concrete and steel are shown in Fig. 15.

Fig. 15
figure 15

Moment-curvature plot comparison between a concrete modeled using Concrete04 and Concret04Update and b steel modeled using Hysteretic and HystereticUpdate

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Figure 15 depicts that the moment–curvature plots for Concrete04 and Concret04Update as well as Hysteretic and HystereticUpdate are exactly identical which ensures that the new material Concrete04Update and HystereticUpdate has no functional difference when compared to Concret04 and Hysteretic respectively. This step also ensures that, in addition to capability of updating the area of steel for a deteriorating bridge, the material characteristics of steel and concrete can also be simultaneously updated using the new materials. The dynamic analysis of the bridge subjected to the subsequent earthquakes followed by the first earthquake is performed using the new updated OpenSees executable.

Appendix B

See the Tables 2 and 3.

Table 2 Multilinear regression model coefficients for non-deteriorating bridge conditions corresponding to multiple shock scenario
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Table 3 Multilinear regression model coefficients for deteriorating bridge conditions corresponding to multiple shock scenario
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Panchireddi, B., Ghosh, J. Cumulative vulnerability assessment of highway bridges considering corrosion deterioration and repeated earthquake events. Bull Earthquake Eng 17, 1603–1638 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10518-018-0509-3

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