ABSTRACT
The design of traditional Chilean bridges (Valenzuela et al. 2015) has been based so far on the national design code Manual de Carreteras and AASHTO Standard. However, from the last five years it has been introduced in Chile the code AASHTO LRFD which incorporates the structural redundancy as part of design. Redundancy is a concept that has been studied for over 30 years due to its beneficial effects, such as optimizing alternative load paths, in order to achieve higher degrees of structural safety.
This paper presents the first applications in Chile of the structural redundancy concept on an analysis of structural review of a bridge designed without considering redundancy in its current design. The redundancy levels of this traditional Chilean bridge, Ramadillas 2 (A reinforced concrete multi-span simple supported bridge), are evaluated through a pushover analysis on a finite element model, using the computational software Sap 2000, emulating the loads which mostly affect bridge type structures in Chile: scour and seismic loads and eventually to evaluate its performance according to a methodology developed based on the work of (Liu et al. 2000).
The interest to look for additional safety measures is because Chilean bridges suffer pier stability problems because of scour generated by the hydraulic systems of rivers and streams, along with seismic hazard due to having high seismic activity.
Finally it is concluded that the advantage of using structural redundancy in designing stages, verifying that the design of traditional Chilean bridges have sufficient capacity and structural safety, enables to optimize future designs with possible reductions in costs and deadlines.
