Deformation-based seismic design of concrete bridges

A performance-based design (PBD) procedure, initially proposed for the seismic design of buildings, is tailored herein to the structural configurations commonly adopted in bridges. It aims at the efficient design of bridges for multiple performance levels (PLs), achieving control over a broad range of design parameters (i.e., strains, deformations, ductility factors) most of which are directly estimated at the design stage using advanced analysis tools (a special type of inelastic dynamic analysis). To evaluate the efficiency of the proposed design methodology, it is applied to an actual bridge that was previously designed using a different PBD method, namely displacement-based design accounting for higher mode effects, thus enabling comparison of the alternative PBD approaches. Assessment of the proposed method using nonlinear dynamic analysis for a set of spectrum-compatible motions, indicate that it results in satisfactory performance of the bridge. Comparison with the displacement-based method reveals significant cost reduction, albeit at the expense of increased computational effort.