Effect of Ground Motion Directionality on Fragility Characteristics of a Highway Bridge.pdfVIP

Hindawi Publishing Corporation Advances in Civil Engineering Volume 2011, Article ID 536171, 12 pages doi:10.1155/2011/536171 Research Article Effect of Ground Motion Directionality on Fragility Characteristics of a Highway Bridge Swagata Banerjee Basu1 and Masanobu Shinozuka2 1 Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802, USA 2 Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of California, Irvine, CA 92697, USA Correspondence should be addressed to Swagata Banerjee Basu, swagata@ Received 1 June 2011; Accepted 27 August 2011 Academic Editor: Manolis Papadrakakis Copyright © 2011 S. Banerjee Basu and M. Shinozuka. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. It is difficult to incorporate multidimensional effect of the ground motion in the design and response analysis of structures. The motion trajectory in the corresponding multi-dimensional space results in time variant principal axes of the motion and defies any meaningful definition of directionality of the motion. However, it is desirable to consider the directionality of the ground motion in assessing the seismic damageability of bridges which are one of the most vulnerable components of highway transportation systems. This paper presents a practice-oriented procedure in which the structure can be designed to ensure the safety under single or a pair of independent orthogonal ground motions traveling horizontally with an arbitrary direction to structural axis. This procedure uses nonlinear time history analysis and accounts for the effect of directionality in the form of frag