This SGER (Small Grant for Exploratory Research) award enables the principal investigators to take advantage of the imminent opportunity afforded by major bridge reconstruction ongoing in the vicinity of Salt Lake City for Interstate 15. The focus of the work is on instrumentation installation and monitoring during full-scale structural and geotechnical testing of an existing bridge bent that is scheduled to be removed in the highway reconstruction. Cyclic compressive, uplift, and lateral loads will be applied to the existing bent pile caps and the shallow footings will support the reaction frame. The soils beneath the reaction frame footings will be reinforced with granular columns. The results from the tests will be compared with the results from finite element analysis, permitting a validation of the geotechnical and structural model and the behavior of the materials and structures. This research has the potential to make a tremendous impact on the state-of-the-art with respect to the response, analysis, and design of pile and granular-column reinforced foundation systems subjected to cyclic compressive, uplift and lateral loads. In addition, this research has the potential to make an important contribution to the knowledge base regarding soil-structure interaction for these same types of loads. This contribution will be especially significant because little work has been done on soil-structure interaction analyses of full-scale structures, including the availability of data from full-scale testing.
