Abstract
At high levels of seismic excitation, passive earth pressure at the abutments may provide resistance to excessive longitudinal bridge deck displacement. Full scale tests and Finite Element (FE) simulations are performed in order to investigate this resistance. The static passive earth pressure force-displacement relationship is recorded in two tests, by pushing a model wall into dense sand with silt (c-ϕ) backfill. Based on an analysis of the recorded data, a calibrated FE model is developed and used to generate passive force-displacement relationships for a range of typical backfill soil properties and abutment heights. In an additional testing phase, the wall-backfill system is subjected to shake table excitations in order to document the corresponding dynamic earth pressure forces and mechanisms. At high g-levels of excitation, the instantaneous passive resistance is shown to also depend on the inertial backfill forces caused by ground shaking. Based on the testing and simulation results, simplified abutment models are presented, which include the experimentally observed backfill inertial effects along with the static passive force-displacement resistance. Numerical FE simulations are finally used to demonstrate the influence of these abutment models within the overall bridge system configuration, and highlight the salient dynamic response characteristics as a function of the various modeling parameters.
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Acknowledgements
Support for this research was provided by the National Science Foundation (NSF) NEES-R grant number 0420347 under the overall direction of Professor M. Saiid Saiidi of the University of Nevada at Reno (UNR). Financial support for the second author in the form of the UCSD Robert and Natalie Englekirk Fellowship is also gratefully acknowledged. Dr. Chris Latham, Dr. Azadeh Bozorgzadeh, and Dr. Anoosh Shamsabadi provided much help and insight during the planning stages. The success of the experimental phase would not have been possible without the help of Alex Sherman, Lonnie Rodriguez, Mike Dyson and the entire Englekirk Structural Engineering Center staff. Dr. Arul Arulmoli of Earth Mechanics, Inc., Joe Vettel of Geocon Inc., and James Ward and Allan Santos of Leighton and Associates are all gratefully acknowledged for services donated regarding backfill material testing.
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Elgamal, A., Wilson, P. (2012). Full Scale Testing and Simulation of Seismic Bridge Abutment-Backfill Interaction. In: Sakr, M., Ansal, A. (eds) Special Topics in Earthquake Geotechnical Engineering. Geotechnical, Geological and Earthquake Engineering, vol 16. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2060-2_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2060-2_4
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