• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.24 no.3
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• pp.355-374
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• 2006

Thin walled steel bridge-piers/columns are vulnerable to damage, when subjected to earthquake excitations. Local buckling, global buckling or interaction between local and global buckling usually is the cause of this damage, which results in significant strength reduction of the member. In this study new innovative design concepts, "thin-walled corrugated steel columns" and "thin-walled cellular steel columns" are presented, which allow the column to undergo large plastic deformations without significant strength reduction; hence dissipate energy under cyclic loading. It is shown that, compared with the conventional designs, circular and stiffened box sections, these new innovative concepts might results in cost-effective designs, with improved buckling and ductility properties. Using a finite element model, that takes the non-linear material properties into consideration, it is shown that the corrugations will act like longitudinal stiffeners that are supporting each other, thus improving the buckling behavior and allowing for reduction of the overall wall thickness of the column.

• Steel and Composite Structures
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• v.36 no.4
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• pp.463-480
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• 2020

Although detailed shell analysis is suitable to predict the ductile crack initiation life of steel members, such detailed method adds time expense and complexity. In order to simply predict the ductile crack initiation life of stiffened steel bridge piers, a total of 33 cases are simulated to carry out the parametric analyses. In the analysis, the effects of the width-to-thickness ratio, slenderness ratio, plate thickness and so on are considered. Both shell analyses and beam analyses about these 33 cases are conducted. The plastic strain and damage index obtained from shell and beam analyses are compared. The modified factor β_s is determined based on the predicted results obtained from both shell and beam analyses in order to simulate the strain concentration at the base corner of the steel bridge piers. Finally, three experimental results are employed to verify the validity of the proposed method in this study.

• Steel and Composite Structures
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• v.26 no.5
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• pp.583-594
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• 2018

Although a lot of experimental and analytical investigations have been carried out for steel bridge piers made of SS400 and SM490, the formulas available for SS400 and SM490 are not suitable for evaluating ultimate load and deformation capacities of steel bridge piers made of high strength steel (HSS) SM570. The effect of various parameters is investigated in this paper, including plate width-to-thickness ratio, column slenderness ratio and axial compression force ratio, on the ultimate load and deformation capacities of steel bridge box piers made of SM570 steel subjected to cyclic loading. The elasto-plastic behavior of the steel bridge piers under cyclic loads is simulated through plastic large deformation finite element analysis, in which a modified two-surface model (M2SM) including cyclic hardening is employed to trace the material nonlinearity. An extensive parametric study is conducted to study the influences of structural parameters on the ultimate load and deformation capacities. Based on these analytical investigations, new formulas for predicting ultimate load and deformation capacities of steel bridge piers made of SM570 are proposed. This study extends the ultimate load and deformation capacities evaluation of steel bridge piers from SS400, SM490 steels to SM570 steel, and provides some useful suggestions.