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Presence of vehicles on a bridge has been observed many times during past earthquakes. Although in practice, the engineers may or may not include the live load contribution to seismic weight in design, current bridge design codes do not specify a certain guideline. A very limited research has been conducted to address this issue from design point of view. The focus of this research is to experimentally assess the effect of a vehicle on the seismic response of a bridge through a large-scale model. In this scope, a 12-meter long bridge, having a one lane deck with concrete slab on steel girders, has been shaken under five different ground motions obtained from recent earthquakes that occurred in Turkey, in its transverse direction, both with and without a vehicle on top of the deck. The measured results have indicated that top slab transverse acceleration and bearing displacements can reduce up to 18.7% in presence of a vehicle during seismic tests, which is an indication of reduction in substructure forces. The main reason for the reduction in seismic response of the bridge in the presence of live load can be ascribed to the increase in damping of the system due to mass damper-like action induced by the vehicle. This beneficial effect cannot be observed in vertical seismic response. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

SUMMARY New types of fiber-reinforced rubber-based seismic isolators have been a research interest for a number of engineers in the past decade. These new types of isolators can have similar seismic performances compared with the conventional ones. In most of the previous researches, the fiber-reinforced rubber-based isolators is usually manufactured with placing fiber sheets between precut rubber layers with the use of a bonding agent. This research differs from the previous researches in terms of manufacturing process, use of fiber mesh instead of fiber sheets, and use of lead in the core for some of the bearings. The aim of this research is to provide comparisons in fundamental seismic response properties of the new type of fiber mesh reinforced isolators and conventional isolators. In this scope, four pairs of fiber mesh reinforced elastomeric bearings and four pairs of steel-reinforced elastomeric bearings are subjected to various levels of compression stresses and cyclic shear strains under constant vertical pressure. The tested types of isolators are fiber mesh reinforced elastomeric bearing, fiber mesh reinforced elastomeric bearing with lead core, steel-reinforced elastomeric bearings, and steel-reinforced elastomeric bearings with lead core. In this research, steel-reinforced bearings are called conventional isolators. The major advantage for fiber mesh reinforced bearings observed during the tests is that these isolators can develop a considerable low horizontal stiffness compared with the conventional isolators. The damping characteristics of the new and conventional types are similar to each other. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]