Behavior of a timber bridge pile embedded in a reinforced concrete cap Conference Paper uri icon

abstract

  • An experimental study is used to characterize the behavior of Pinus Radiata bridge piles embedded in a reinforced concrete cap beam when subjected to earthquake induced motion. A nonlinear model of the pile and connection is developed from experimentally measured properties of wood coupons. Incremental Dynamic Analysis (IDA) is used to identify the most critical earthquake ground motion and the intensity required to achieve the level of lateral drift that corresponds to the drift capacity of the pile. It is shown that the model used for the IDA needs to provide a good estimate of the wood properties in order to select a suitable ground motion and define its intensity. Experimental results for an 80 % of full scale bridge pile are presented for bidirectional quasi-static and pseudo dynamic tests. The predicted response is shown to have good agreement with the hysteretic response for the bi-directional pseudo dynamic test. It is concluded that for performance based design purposes, the chord rotation of these pile foundation connections should be limited to 0.03 radians.

published proceedings

  • 8th US National Conference on Earthquake Engineering 2006

author list (cited authors)

  • Deam, B. L., Mander, J. B., & Rahardjo, T.

complete list of authors

  • Deam, BL||Mander, JB||Rahardjo, T

publication date

  • December 2006