Experimental study on seismic performance of highs-strength reinforced concrete regular piers

In order to relieve seismic damage and enhance restoring capability of bridge piers, the concept of arranging partial high strength steel bars replacing the corresponding longitudinal and hooped ordinary strength steel bars was presented. Compare to the ordinary steel bars, the high strength steel bars has the closeable elastic modulus and higher strength, which can be used to reduce deformation of bridge piers during strong earthquake movement. Through experimental study on four high- strength concrete columns subjected to low cyclic reversed loading, the failure patterns, hysteretic curves and skeleton curves were obtained. The influence of longitudinal high-strength reinforcement ratio upon the hysteretic characteristics, ductile behavior and ability of energy dissipation were analyzed. The results show that the main failure pattern was bending failure; and with the increscent of the longitudinal high-strength reinforcing steel bar ratio, the columns can endure larger seismic loads and displacement; the seismic performance of the whole bridge piers can be effectively improved by arranging reasonable high-strength reinforcing steel bars.