Abstract
To investigate the seismic performance of hollow reinforced concrete (RC) bridge columns of rectangular cross section under constant axial load and cyclically biaxial bending, five specimens were tested. A parametric study is carried out for different axial load ratios, longitudinal reinforcement ratios and lateral reinforcement ratios. The experimental results showed that all tested specimens failed in the flexural failure mode and their ultimate performance was dominated by flexural capacity, which is represented by the rupture/buckling of tensile longitudinal rebars at the bottom of the bridge columns. Biaxial force and displacement hysteresis loops showed significant stiffness and strength degradations, and the pinching effect and coupling interaction effect of both directions severely decrease the structural seismic resistance. However, the measured ductility coefficient varying from 3.5 to 5.7 and the equivalent viscous damping ratio varying from 0.19 and 0.26 can meet the requirements of the seismic design. The hollow RC rectangular bridge columns with configurations of lateral reinforcement in this study have excellent performance under bidirectional earthquake excitations, and may be considered as a substitute for current hollow RC rectangular section configurations described in the Guideline for Seismic Design of Highway Bridges (JTG/T B02-01-2008). The length of the plastic hinge region was found to approach one sixth of the hollow RC rectangular bridge column height for all specimen columns, and it was much less than those specified in the current JTG/T. Thus, the length of the plastic hinge region is more concentrated for RC rectangular hollow bridge columns.
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Supported by: National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant No. 51178008, No. 50908005; National Basic Research Program of China under Grant No. 2011CB013600 and the International Cooperative Project of NSFC-JST under Grant No. 51021140003, a Joint Research Project between the Beijing University of Technology and the University at Buffalo with Partial Support from the U.S. Federal Highway Administration under Contract No. DTFH61-07-C-00020.
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Han, Q., Du, X., Zhou, Y. et al. Experimental study of hollow rectangular bridge column performance under vertical and cyclically bilateral loads. Earthq. Eng. Eng. Vib. 12, 433–445 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11803-013-0184-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11803-013-0184-y