Effects of Ground Motion Duration on Seismic Damage of Bridge Isolation Bearings Based on Friction SDOF System.

It is generally perceived that ground motion duration has an effect on structural seismic response and damage, despite the neglect of current seismic codes. Based on friction SDOF systems, this paper investigates the duration effect of ground motions on seismic responses and damage of sliding bearings. Ground motions are divided into long-duration (LD) and short-duration (SD) cases, taking the significant duration of 25 s as the boundary. Each case consists of natural records and spectrally equivalent artificial ground motions to decouple duration from other earthquake characteristics. Results from response history analyses implicate that duration has hardly any effect on seismic responses of the system exhibiting an approximate linear elasticity. Nevertheless, for systems with distinct frictional nonlinearity, selecting LD ground motions as seismic inputs usually leads to a conservative result. By performing incremental dynamic analysis (IDA), nonlinear systems in SD cases bear 10% higher damage risk than those in LD cases without considering the influence of temperature rise. The same is true for systems with a small friction coefficient of 0.005 when earthquakes are in the low intensity range. It was also found that damage exceedance probabilities of these small friction coefficient systems are almost unaffected by the duration as the peak ground acceleration increases to more than 0.6 g. When the effect of temperature rise caused by friction is considered, the damage exceedance probability in LD cases is higher than SD cases. The damage probability of friction SDOF system under LD earthquake will be underestimated without considering the influence of temperature rise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]