There has been increasing interest in evaluating the performance of existing
reinforced concrete (RC) bridges just after natural disasters or man-made events
especially when the defects are invisible, or in quantifying the improvement after
rehabilitations. In order to obtain an accurate assessment of the reliability of a RC
bridge, it is critical to incorporate information about its current structural properties,
which reflects the possible aging and deterioration. This dissertation proposes to
develop an adaptive reliability analysis of RC bridges incorporating the damage
detection information obtained from nondestructive testing (NDT).
In this study, seismic fragility is used to describe the reliability of a structure
withstanding future seismic demand. It is defined as the conditional probability that a
seismic demand quantity attains or exceeds a specified capacity level for given values of
earthquake intensity. The dissertation first develops a probabilistic capacity model for
RC columns and the capacity model can be used when the flexural stiffness decays nonuniformly
over a column height. Then, a general methodology to construct probabilistic seismic demand models for RC highway bridges with one single-column bent is
presented. Next, a combination of global and local NDT methods is proposed to identify
in-place structural properties. The global NDT uses the dynamic responses of a structure
to assess its global/equivalent structural properties and detect potential damage locations.
The local NDT uses local measurements to identify the local characteristics of the
structure. Measurement and modeling errors are considered in the application of the
NDT methods and the analysis of the NDT data. Then, the information obtained from
NDT is used in the probabilistic capacity and demand models to estimate the seismic
fragility of the bridge. As an illustration, the proposed probabilistic framework is
applied to a reinforced concrete bridge with a one-column bent. The result of the
illustration shows that the proposed framework can successfully provide the up-to-date
structural properties and accurate fragility estimates.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:tamu.edu/oai:repository.tamu.edu:1969.1/ETD-TAMU-2010-05-7920 |
| Date | 2010 May 1900 |
| Creators | Huang, Qindan |
| Contributors | Gardoni, Paolo |
| Source Sets | Texas A and M University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | thesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
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