Guidelines for Ground Motion Modeling for Performance Based Earthquake Engineering of Ordinary Bridges

Sponsor: California Department of Transportation (Caltrans)

Project Title: Guidelines for Ground Motion Modeling for Performance Based Earthquake Engineering of Ordinary Bridges

PI: Professor Yousef Bozorgnia
Funding Level: $26,161

Project Description:

The overarching goal of the research proposed here is to create and implement a ground motion representation framework for performance-based design and assessment of standard ordinary bridges in California. These guidelines will draw from current body of knowledge in ground motion selection and scaling and ground motion simulation that was developed in the past few years through NIST, NSF, and PEER funded research. The proposed guidelines will further extend the existing guidelines by providing a comprehensive treatment of ground motion directionality and near field effects, incident angle, and analysis issues for Caltrans standard ordinary bridges. The extensions will address the following issues: (1) Adjustment of pairs of orthogonal ground motion spectra, for a target design response spectrum, including adjustment for near fault effects, (2) Procedure for ground motion simulation capable of addressing issues such as variability in simulation parameters and multiple source contribution to seismic hazard, (3) Procedure for ground motion application capable of addressing issues such as incident angle and optimum number of required motions for seismic response history analyses in the context of performance-based earthquake engineering of standard ordinary bridges. The proposed guidelines will be augmented using a series of worked examples accompanied by model input files. These examples, and continuous interaction with Caltrans engineers during the development process, are intended to facilitate transfer of the proposed guidelines to Caltrans practice.