The objective of this Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program award is to mitigate damage and to enhance the robustness and functionality of reinforced concrete bridges subjected to moderate-to-strong earthquakes and their aftershocks. For damage-control, the project will investigate the application of a new concrete confinement technology utilizing the shape memory alloys (SMAs) as the transverse reinforcement. This new technology capitalizes on the concept of active confinement. The research activities planned for this project include: (1) Conducting multi-axial monotonic and cyclic tests on concrete elements confined with the new reinforcement. (2) Developing general 3-dimensional plasticity model for concrete confined with SMA reinforcement with enhanced damage prediction feature. (3) Examining the durability and long-term performance of SMA reinforcement through laboratory tests and field tests conducted on real bridges in Illinois. (4) Developing models for realistic seismic hazard scenarios comprising moderate-to-strong main shock followed by a series of aftershocks. (5) Conducting seismic damage analyses to develop fragility curves for bridges reinforced with the new technology. (6) Conducting confirmatory hybrid simulation tests on reduced-scale reinforced concrete bridge piers strengthened with the new confinement technology.
This project will provide the earthquake engineering community with critical, in-depth, information about the new confinement technology. It will address the modeling, durability, and design issues that are crucial for this technology to reach its full potential in delivering immediate solutions to the problems of post-earthquake functionality, down time, and repair costs of critical lifeline bridges. The results of this project will be directly disseminated to the graduate and senior level civil engineering students through two graduate level concrete design courses taught at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. To encourage and promote the involvement of K-12 students from underrepresented groups in the field of Civil Engineering, a part of this award will be directed to organize an annual summer camp for female high school students. To increase the awareness of this new technology among the practicing bridge engineers, the PI will organize a workshop to disseminate the project results to this group of engineers. The project will also promote the new hybrid simulation testing technique used in this project to the seismic research community. Finally, this project will also increase the awareness among the research and practitioner communities about the impacts of strong earthquake aftershocks on the design of civil engineering structures.
