Peculiarities of Calculating Bridges with Seismic Isolation Including Spherical Bearings and Hydraulic Dampers in Russia

The peculiarities of calculating isolated structures with spherical bearings are analyzed in this paper. Some of peculiarities are caused by the lack of data at the moment when engineering solutions had to be made. Other peculiarities are connected with physical peculiarities of the device behaviour. To provide the analysis of structure behaviour under the condition of the lack of input information, two types of design models of seismic protection devices were considered. They are the dampers linearization and the modelling of real dampers by dry friction ones. The dampers linearization makes it possible to use the existing software for calculating linear strongly-damped systems. To calculate structures with dry friction dampers, a new software was worked out. In this case, the structure is described as a piecewise-linear system of a relay-type. The investigations of the structure oscillations take into account both horizontal and vertical components of earthquake input. Under this condition, horizontal oscillation equations of structures are the Mattie-Hill ones. The input and structure parameters which caused the structure instability are estimated. To exclude the structure instability, high damping devices should be used. These methods were used for seismic resistant analysis of bridges with spherical bearings and hydraulic dampers applied in Sochi.