COMPUTATIONAL MODELING OF DAMAGES IN BRIDGE PIERS

International audienceBridges are one of the most vulnerable structures to an earthquake damage. Due to an obsolete code for bridge design and poor construction practices in Pakistan, most of the bridges are seismically deficient. Experimental tests are helpful in assessment of bridge piers but requires considerable resources. In that account, numerical tools are also used for the assessment of bridge piers and various numerical techniques are available which can be utilized in this regard. This work focuses on non-linear modeling of bridge piers and validation of proposed computational scheme with experimental data using a Finite element based software-Abaqus. A single circular bridge pier subjected to a monotonic lateral load is modeled in the finite element software. For this purpose, a plasticity based damage model Concrete Damage Plasticity (CDP) is used for modeling damages in Abaqus. CDP considers concrete crushing and tensile cracking as the main failure mechanism. A constitutive model for concrete compression-Modified Kent and Park model-and tensile cracking-exponential relation for the tension stiffening-to obtain the CDP parameters are used. Mesh sensitivity analysis is performed to select a suitable mesh size as well as configuration for the numerical modeling. Additionally, the effect of step size on percentage of kinetic energy produced during the analysis is studied. Computational analysis demonstrates that the proposed scheme predicts damages in accord with the experimental results