Numerical simulations of a highway bridge structure employing passive negative stiffness device for seismic protection

A new passive seismic response control device has been developed, fabricated, and tested by the authors and shown to be capable of producing negative stiffness via a purely mechanical mechanism, thus representing a new generation of seismic protection devices. Although the concept of negative stiffness may appear to be a reversal on the desired relationship between the force and displacement in structures (the desired relationship being that the product of restoring force and displacement is nonnegative), when implemented in parallel with a structure having positive stiffness, the combined system appears to have substantially reduced stiffness while remaining stable. Thus, there is an ‘apparent weakening and softening’ of the structure that results in reduced forces and increased displacements (where the weakening and softening is of a non‐damaging nature in that it occurs in a seismic protection device rather than within the structural framing system). Any excessive displacement response can then be limited by incorporating a damping device in parallel with the negative stiffness device. The combination of negative stiffness and passive damping provides a large degree of control over the expected performance of the structure. In this paper, a numerical study is presented on the performance of a seismically isolated highway bridge model that is subjected to various strong earthquake ground motions. The Negative Stiffness Devices (NSDs) are described along with their hysteretic behavior as obtained from a series of cyclic tests wherein the tests were conducted using a modified design of the NSDs (modified for testing within the bridge model). Using the results from the cyclic tests, numerical simulations of the seismic response of the isolated bridge model were conducted for various configurations (with/without negative stiffness devices and/or viscous dampers). The results demonstrate that the addition of negative stiffness devices reduces the base shear substantially, while the deck displacement is limited to acceptable values. This assessment was conducted as part of a NEES (Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation) project which included shaking table tests of a quarter‐scale highway bridge model. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Seismic strengthening of RC columns using external steel cage

Steel caging technique is commonly used for the seismic strengthening of reinforced concrete (RC) columns of rectangular cross‐section. The steel cage consists of angle sections placed at corners and held together by battens at intervals along the height. In the present study, a rational design method is developed to proportion the steel cage considering its confinement effect on the column concrete. An experimental study was carried out to verify the effectiveness of the proposed design method and detailing of steel cage battens within potential plastic hinge regions. One ordinary RC column and two strengthened columns were investigated experimentally under constant axial compressive load and gradually increasing reversed cyclic lateral displacements. Both strengthened columns showed excellent behavior in terms of flexural strength, lateral stiffness, energy dissipation and ductility due to the external confinement of the column concrete. The proposed model for confinement effect due to steel cage reasonably predicted moment capacities of the strengthened sections, which matched with the observed experimental values. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.