IMPAβ: Incremental modal pushover analysis for bridges

In the present study, the incremental modal pushover analysis (IMPAβ), a pushover-based approach already proposed and applied to buildings by the same authors, was revised and proposed for bridges (IMPAβ). Pushover analysis considers the effects of higher modes on the structural response. Bridges are structurally very different from multi-story buildings, where multimodal pushover (MPA) has been developed and is currently used. In bridges, consideration for higher modes is often necessary: The responses of some structural elements of the bridge (e.g., piers) influence the overall bridge response. Therefore, the failure of these elements can determine the failure of the whole structure, even if they give a small contribution total base shear. Incremental dynamic analysis (IDA) requires input accelerograms for high intensities, which are rare in the databases, while scaling of generated accelerograms with a simple increment of the scaling acceleration is not appropriate. This fact renders IDA, which is by its nature time-consuming, not straightforward. On the contrary, the change of input spectrum required by IMPA is simple. IMPAβ also utilizes a simple complementary method coupled to MPA, to obtain bounds at very high seismic intensities. Finally, the two incremental methods based on static nonlinear and dynamic nonlinear analyses are compared.