Risk-Based Assessment of Seismic Repair Costs for Reinforced Concrete Bridges Considering Competing Repair Strategies Academic Article uri icon

abstract

  • 2019 American Society of Civil Engineers. This paper outlines a procedure to support the selection of repair strategies for damaged structures after an earthquake. Under strong shaking, modern code-compliant bridges can sustain significant damage to their ductile members and failure of sacrificial members. However, there are many choices of repair strategies and no clear guidance on their selection. This paper proposes a seismic performance assessment framework to determine repair costs for reinforced concrete bridges, considering costs associated with both the initial repair and future expected seismic repairs (which are based on the performance of the repaired bridge). For initial repair, the paper considers several common column repair techniques, which are separately evaluated in terms of direct costs. For future expected repairs, the paper proposes a method to evaluate the effect of each of the repair strategies on a repaired bridge's postrepair future seismic performance to quantify the expected repair costs associated with each strategy over the remaining service life of the bridge. The procedure is demonstrated for two conventional concrete bridges, but can be applied to any concrete bridge or other bridges with some modifications in the details. The results show the importance of considering postrepair performance in the choice of repair strategy. Although the initial seismic repair costs of competing repair strategies are similar, some repaired bridges will incur higher repair costs in subsequent events. As a result, in cases where the repairs need to be performed early in the life of the bridge, the service life expected costs of strategies can differ by a factor of two.

published proceedings

  • JOURNAL OF BRIDGE ENGINEERING

author list (cited authors)

  • Valigura, J., Liel, A. B., & Sideris, P.

citation count

  • 7

complete list of authors

  • Valigura, J||Liel, AB||Sideris, P

publication date

  • November 2019