RC jacketing parameters to retrofit highway bridges

Highway bridges are essential structures in the transportation system of any country in the world. Many highway bridges are reinforced concrete (RC) bridges that were constructed before the 1980s, prior to current seismic regulation codes. The continuous modification of regulation codes makes it necessary to evaluate structures, and in many cases, existing bridges require interventions to increase their seismic capacity. Among the different techniques used to improve bridge capacity, encasing the columns with RC jackets increases the strength and stiffness of the substructure. RC jacketing increases the column cross sections, improves the seismic capacity and reduces the seismic vulnerability of the bridge substructures. This work presents a parametric study to assess the expected demands of seismically deficient medium length highway bridges retrofitted with RC jacketing aimed at determining the best jacket parameters. A suite of twenty strong ground motions, recorded from a subduction seismic source close to the Pacific Coast in Mexico, was selected to characterize the seismic demand. The bridge superstructures are simply supported with five 30 m long spans for a total length of 150 m. The bridge models have five possible pier heights of 5, 10, 15 20 and 25 m and three different jacket thicknesses and steel ratios. Pushover analyses and capacity spectra of the family of accelerograms allow for the determination of the pier demands by obtaining the performance point as the intersection of the capacity and demand curves. The results allow for the determination of the influence of each parameter on the expected seismic behavior of the bridge models, with the aim of selecting the most suitable jacket characteristics to improve the seismic bridge performance.