Direct displacement-based seismic assessment procedure for multi-span reinforced concrete bridges with single-column piers

In Italy, as in other high seismic risk countries, many bridges, nowadays deemed ‘strategic’ for civil protection interventions after an earthquake, were built without antiseismic criteria, and therefore their seismic assessment is mandatory. Accordingly, the development of a seismic assessment procedure that gives reliable results and, at the same time, is sufficiently simple to be applied on a large population of bridges in a short time is very useful. In this paper, a displacement-based procedure for the assessment of multi-span RC bridges, satisfying these requirements and called direct displacement-based assessment (DDBA), is proposed. Based on the direct displacement-based design previously developed by Priestley et al., DDBA idealizes the multi DOF bridge structure as an equivalent SDOF system and hence defines a safety factor in terms of displacement. DDBA was applied to hypothetical bridge configurations. The same structures were analyzed also using standard force-based approach. The reliability of the two methods was checked performing IDA with response spectrum compatible accelerograms.