Progress of Applications and Studies on Earthquake Resistance Design of Bridges in Korea

This paper describes the state-of-the art research activities on seismic isolation systems for improving the seismic capacities of the bridges in Korea. Though Korea is located in a region of low-to-moderate seismicity, the construction of seismic isolation systems has increased rapidly. The application of seismic isolation system has become popular worldwide because of its stable behavior and economical construction especially for bridge structures. Since optimal reliability level of isolated bridges can be determined as the one that provides the highest net life-cycle benefit to society, or the minimum Life-Cycle Cost (LCC), an optimal design procedure based on minimum LCC concept is more expedient for the design of seismically isolated bridges in areas of low-to-moderate seismicty. To verify the adequacy of the new design concept based on the LCC minimization, experimental studies on seismically isolated bridge are introduced as well, which include pseudo-dynamic test of scaled pier and dynamic field test of full-scale. With the application of seismic isolation systems, many kinds of dampers to improve the seismic capacity of structure are also applied not only to new bridges but also to existing bridges.