Analysis of a High-pier Railway Bridge under Spatial Stochastic Stationary and Non-stationary Earthquake Excitations

Original scientific paper The objectives of this paper are to perform a comparative analysis of the large-scale system of a high-pier railway bridge subjected to stationary and nonstationary spatially varying earthquake excitations using the pseudo-excitation method (PEM), and to estimate whether or not the non-stationary stochastic analysis of the high-pier railway bridges under tri-directional spatial ground motions can be simplified into a stationary random analysis to avoid excessive computation. Based on the finite element software ANSYS, the stationary and non-stationary stochastic excitations analyses of a high-pier bridge were transformed into harmonic analyses and deterministic transient analyses in the study, respectively, by using PEM. The wave-passage effect and the incoherence effect were modelled as the key factors, a total of twelve cases were considered to investigate the wave-passage effect and incoherence effect on the seismic response of a high-pier railway bridge under stationary and non-stationary earthquake excitations. Results show that structural responses under stationary excitation are larger than those under non-stationary by considering either the wave-passage effect or the incoherence effect. Through comparing structural responses under stationary excitation with those under non-stationary one, all the growth rates are less than 25 %, which is acceptable in engineering, meaning that a non-stationary stochastic analysis of high-pier railway bridges under tri-directional spatial ground motions can be simplified into a stationary analysis to avoid excessive computation.