Evaluating effectiveness and optimum design of isolation devices for highway bridges using the fragility function method

Seismic isolation can be used as a practical method to mitigate earthquake hazards for designing new highway bridges or retrofitting existing ones. To realize a reliable and effective seismic isolation design, several important and often interacting factors should be considered, including the ground motion characteristics, structural configurations and properties, mechanical properties of isolation devices and soil-structure interaction etc. This paper adopts the performance-based evaluation approach to investigate the effectiveness and optimum design parameters of isolation devices so as to minimize the overall damaging potential of seismically-isolated bridges. Fragility functions, which define the probability exceeding a performance state at a given set of earthquake intensities, are derived using nonlinear time history analyses of typical highway bridges (conventionally designed or base-isolated) subject to a suite of 250 earthquake motions. The nonlinear models for bridge columns and isolation devices are incorporated and various combinations of isolation parameters, e.g. elastic stiffness, characteristic strength and post-yielding stiffness, representing common types of isolation devices are evaluated. Both Probabilistic Seismic Demand Analysis (PSDA) and Incremental Dynamic Analysis (IDA) methods are used and compared in generating the fragility functions. Damage criteria for both piers and isolation devices are established to relate the component response quantities to global damage states of bridges. The study shows that the mechanical properties of isolation devices have a significant effect on the damage probability of isolated bridges. By evaluating the earthquake intensity required to achieve specified damage states of base-isolated bridges, the optimum combinations of mechanical parameters of isolation devices are identified as a function of structural properties and damage states. The findings can serve as a practical guide for isolation device designs where the uncertainties with ground motions and variability of structural properties are effectively incorporated under the fragility function framework.