Seismic Evaluation of the Cooper River Bridge Featured

The New Cooper River Bridge in Charleston, South Carolina, is the longest cable-stayed bridge in North America. The bridge's suspended span length is approximately 1005m and consists of a main span, two side spans, and two anchor spans. Figure 1 presents the Central part of the Cooper River Bridge. The deck, which carries 8 traffic lanes and a pedestrian/bikeway, is supported by two towers in the shape of a diamond, around 175m tall. A composite concrete deck with I-shaped steel edge girders supports the main span. The border girder that supports the pedestrian/bicycle walkway is cantilevered outside of it. The high level approaches also make use of steel girders and composite steel construction. Over their entire lengths, which are roughly 1326m on the Charleston side and 637m on the Mount Pleasant side, both high approaches are jointless.

For the designing process, SC Solutions, of California, used ADINA. Different options, i.e. ADINA, ADINA Advanced and ADINA Ultimate, are now available for performing advanced non-linear simulations. ADINA is used for Mechanical, Structural and Bridge engineers as it gives the ability to simulate the extremely non-linear behavior, the multi-body dynamics and the physical behavior of digital twins of infrastructure. The advanced non-linear simulations for either design or evaluation of infrastructure, provide greater accuracy of expected performance, subject to normal operational and extreme environmental effects.

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The main span unit of the bridge's and the West and East high level approach structures were combined in a single model and were subjected to inelastic time history analysis as part of design assessments for the bridge's seismic performance. This "global" model, which had roughly 55,000 degrees of freedom, was subjected to time histories of ground motion that varied geographically.

The soil-structure interaction was formally modeled with plasticity-based truss elements, and pushover assessments of the standalone tower/foundation models were carried out to validate the characterizations of the physical behaviors (Figure 2). These are only a few of the specifics. 

The bridge's center gets loaded by earthquakes in the animation up above (with the movements magnified 50 times). Such nonlinear simulations naturally call for the use of a solid engineering background in seismic problem modeling as well as the usage of a powerful and trustworthy analytical tool like ADINA.

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