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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Article
On the Lateral Behavior of the Backfill of a Skew Abutment
Author(s)
Ali Nojoumi1 and Tadeh Zirakian2
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DOI:10.17265/1934-7359/2018.01.003
Affiliation(s)
1. Department of Mechanical Engineering, Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, CA 90045, USA;
2. Department of Civil Engineering and Construction Management, California State University, Northridge, CA 91330, USA
ABSTRACT
It is generally accepted that the interaction between a bridge and its
abutment’s backfill soil is highly nonlinear, especially under a strong
earthquake loading that contains a velocity pulse. For bridges with skew
abutments, the
superstructure-abutment interaction can dominate the overall bridge
performance. This study puts forth a new approach for predicting the lateral capacity of
a skew abutment using verified high-fidelity three‑dimensional continuum finite
element (FE) models. The core idea is that the lateral capacity of a straight
abutment is bounded from above and below by that of the abutment of a skew
bridge that has the same deck-width, and that of another skew bridge (with the
same angle) that has the same backwall length as the original/straight bridge,
respectively. This postulation is then used in reverse to estimate the lateral
capacity of a skew abutment, given the capacity of a straight but otherwise
identical one with an arbitrary
length. In prior research, the latter information had already been obtained in
closed-form expressions that use physical parameters, such as backfill cohesion,
internal friction angle and density, backwall height, and backwall-backfill
friction angle. The approach presented here is constrained by the assumption
that bridge deck will not rotate during loading. While this assumption is generally violated in
a strong earthquake—because a skew bridge will tend to rotate, especially if
its in-plane torsional rigidity is low, the model presented does serve as an
anchor for parameterizing more advanced (e.g., macro-element plasticity) models
that allow rotation, and also as fully parametric lateral response models for
torsionally stiff (i.e., multi-span, multi-bent) skew bridges.
KEYWORDS
Soil-structure interaction, non-rotating abutment walls, numerical simulation.
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