Effect Of Steel Bar Strength On Seismic Behavior And Finite Element Analysis Of Bridge Piers With High Strength Steel Bars

In the construction of modern roads and railways, the bridge is no longer an independent unit, but a vital part of the whole project. As unpredictable natural disaster, the earthquake occurs frequently in some provinces and ruined project constructions badly. Bridge seismic performance which decides whether the road engineering can use normally depends on the bridge pier in the earthquake. In order to reduce the earthquake damage for the bridge and improve its recovery ability and seismic performance, high strength steel bar is applied to bridge pier, because it has the similar elastic modulus with normal steel but higher bearing capacity.Based on the low cyclic loading experiments on bridge pier specimens, the effect of steel bar strength, stirrup spacing and axial compression ratio on seismic behavior including damage characteristic,bearing capacity, displacement, hysteretic characteristic, skeleton curve,rigidity degradation and energy dissipation of bridge pier specimens is analyzed.It is shown that the steel bar strength, axial compression ratio and stirrup spacing have great influences on seismic behavior of the bridge pier with HRB500.With the increase of steel bar strength and the decrease of the axial compression ratio and stirrup spacing, the hysteretic characteristic is improved and the rigidity degradation becomes slow. The bearing capacity is enhanced with the increasing of steel bar strength and axial compression ratio and the decrease of the stirrup spacing.In order to get the best results, a nonlinear numerical simulation research is made with ANSYS finite element analysis software. Compared with the finite element simulation results, the experimental results are credible. As a supplementary, the study which is not tested are well predicted. The results show that replacement of HRB335 bars with HRB500 bars has little influence on the bearing capacity but makes hysteretic characteristic deteriorated, according to the principle of equal strength replacement. And the increasing of axial compression ratio can improve the bearing capacity but deteriorate hysteretic characteristic.