Effects of engineering geological condition on response of suspension bridges

The geological condition may vary largely from one support to another for a long span bridge. The effect of geological variability and spatial variation produced by propagation and coherence loss of seismic ground motion on the response of long span suspension bridges is investigated in this article. The case of Jiangyin Yangtse River Bridge, a suspension bridge with a main span of 1385 m, is studied in detail. Numerical results show that the geological difference at the supports has a significant effect on the seismic response of long span suspension bridges and, that it is unacceptable to neglect the difference. The effect of the propagation of seismic ground motion on the response of long span suspension bridges is far more important than that of the coherence loss. The response of bridges varies greatly with the horizontal apparent velocity in a very complex way, and there is a critical horizontal velocity for a given response quantity.