Author(s): Farzad Farvizi, Bruce W. Melville, Asaad Y. Shamseldin, Stuart E. Norris
Linked Author(s): Farzad Farvizi
Keywords: Tsunami forces, horizontal pressures, wing wall abutment, bridge structure.
Abstract: Over the last two decades, tsunamis in Indonesia (2004), Chile (2010), and Japan (2011) have caused hundreds of thousands of deaths and billions of dollars of damage to many kinds of infrastructure such as ports, roads, bridges, and coastal dwellings. Failure of the transportation infrastructure in these regions of isolated communities hindered emergency services, delayed emergency repairs, and significantly impacted the recovery of local economies. Many of the bridges, which lie within possible tsunami inundation zones, are critical links in transport networks. Therefore, it is necessary to investigate the effects of tsunamis on bridges. To investigate the tsunami effect, physical modeling experiments have been carried out to measure the characteristics of hydrodynamic forces on bridge structures with varying abutment lengths, for various bore strengths. The experiments are conducted in a 14 m long, 1. 2 m wide and 0. 8 m deep wave flume equipped with an automatic gate designed to generate a tsunami bore. Forces and pressures exerted on the bridge model are measured, and a relation between bore velocity and bore height is presented. The results show that horizontal and uplift forces increase with increasing bore height. The vertical reactions increases with increasing abutment length, except the 300 mm length, which is due to the significant amount of water accumulation on the seaside of the bridge structure while the horizontal pressures were slightly sensitive to the variation of the abutment length
Year: 2017