Investigation of seismic damage of cable-stayed bridges with different connection configuration

In this paper, the seismic behaviors of three cable-stayed bridges with different structural systems including Rigid System (RS), Floating System (FS) and Passive Energy Dissipation System (PEDS) are studied. The results show that the seismic behaviors of these bridges are so different even under the same earthquake. Based on damage analysis of the towers, failure modes of the three different systems are concluded. For RS, the bottom of the middle tower is a vulnerable region, implying that the failure mainly focuses here and plastic hinge forms under earthquake. The FS is damaged most severely, in which the edge tower has a larger damage index than that of middle tower. While the seismic responses of PEDS decrease dramatically compared to FS due to the incorporation of viscous dampers and the damage indices for all towers are small. The seismic damage condition between the middle tower and the edge tower can be adjusted by changing the damping coefficient of the viscous damper.