Investigation on the behavior of bridge piers considering rocking isolation constructed on non-plastic silts and sands using 1g shaking table tests

Abstract Occurred damages on the bridge piers during earthquakes lead to significant financial losses worldwide every year and can cause social problems by disrupting traffic flow and transportation services. Rocking isolation of foundations is one of the damage reduction approaches to avoid structural damage on piers by transferring plastic hinges from piers to underlaying soil media. However, the behavior of rocking foundations on sands and clays has been studied comprehensively in past years; the behavior of these foundations on non-plastic silts has not been investigated well in the literature. In this research, the characteristic seismic behavior of a bridge pier considering rocking isolation is evaluated using small-scale physical modeling tests. To this aim, eight shaking table tests are conducted where both sandy and silty material are employed as the soil media. In addition to the effects of the underlying soil, the effects of the critical contact area ratio of the foundation and frequency of input motions are evaluated. Achieved results indicate that the considered bridge pier shows the same behavior trend for underlying silty soil and sandy one. However, because of the frequency-dependent behavior of silts and larger damping properties of such material, pier attracts lower accelerations and higher moments in non-plastic silty soil. Therefore, the achieved results show that the proposed design approaches of rocking foundations that are mostly extracted based on experimental studies on sands (or rarely on clay) can lead to non-conservative designs in silty soils.