Dr. Paolo Gardoni, associate professor in the Zachry Department of Civil Engineering at Texas A&M, will give a talk on seismic fragility estimates Dec. 1 at 3 p.m. in Room 203 of the Zachry Engineering Center.

Dr. Paolo Gardoni

Gardoni’s talk, “Seismic Fragility Estimates for Pristine and Deteriorating Bridges and Bridge Networks,” is part of the seminar series of the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering and sponsored by Parsons Corp.

Gardoni’s research interests are in performance assessment of deteriorating systems, structural reliability, risk and life cycle analysis, modeling, development and implementation of LRFD, probability and stochastic methods, modeling and simulation of natural phenomena, and forecasting. He teaches classes in reinforced concrete design, structural reliability and in risk analysis. He is a member of the American Society of Civil Engineers, where he serves on the Probabilistic Methods Committee of the Engineering Mechanics Division; the American Association of Railroads; the International Civil Engineering Risk and Reliability Association; and the International Association for Structural Safety and Reliability.

Abstract

Fragility estimates are developed to assess the seismic vulnerability of reinforced concrete (RC) bridges and bridge networks. The vulnerability is expressed in terms of the conditional probability (or fragility) that a demand quantity will be greater than or equal to the corresponding capacity, for a given set of seismic demand variables. Seismic structural capacity is defined using unbiased probabilistic models for the drift and shear force capacity. Probabilistic demand models are developed to estimate the drift and shear force demands on RC columns for given values of the earthquake intensity, expressed in terms of the spectral acceleration at the fundamental period of the bridge.
First a comprehensive Bayesian framework is formulated to construct the probabilistic capacity and demand models. Second, the probabilistic capacity and demand models are used in a formulation to assess the fragility of bridge components and systems. Third, the capacity and demand models are extended with a probabilistic model for chloride-induced corrosion and a time-dependent corrosion rate to assess the reliability of bridges over time. Finally, the bridge fragility estimates are used to assess the reliability of bridge networks. Two methodologies are used to assess the probability of disconnection between points (e.g., cities) in the network, a block sampling-based simulation technique and a novel Matrix-based System Reliability (MSR) method.

Although the methodology presented is aimed at developing probabilistic capacity and demand models, and fragilities estimates for RC bridges and bridge networks, the approach is quite general and can be applied to many engineering problems.

Popularity: 12% [?]

Both comments and pings are currently closed.