Influence of earthquake input angle on seismic response of curved girder bridge

The maximum seismic response of curved bridge is significantly related to the input angle of designated earthquake. Owing to structure irregularities, bridge reactions result from the interaction between the moment and torsion forces. Based on the solving of the seismic response of structure excited by a one-way earthquake input, a uniform expression of the unfavorable angle of the earthquake input was derived, and the corresponding maximum response of structure was determined. Considering the orthotropic and skewed dual-directional earthquake input manners, the most unfavorable angles for the two cases were also derived, respectively. Furthermore, a series finite element models were built to analyze the multi-component seismic responses by examining an example of curved girder bridge considering the variation of curvature radius and the bearings arrangement. The seismic responses of the case bridges, were excited by earthquakes at different input angles, and were calculated and analyzed using a response spectrum method. The input angles of earthquake excitation were progressively increased. From the analysis and comparison based on the calculation results mentioned above, the most unfavorable angle of earthquake excitation corresponding to the maximum seismic response of the curved bridge could be determined. It was shown that the most unfavorable angles of earthquake input resulted from the different response combination methods were essentially coherent.