ABSTRACT
Existing reinforced concrete bridges are not typically designed to sustain the significant hydrodynamic forces resulting from river floods, tsunamis and hurricane waves. Particularly, there is an urgent need on vulnerability assessment and risk mitigation techniques for non-ductile bridges. For this purpose, a method for developing fragility functions is proposed in this research that relies on the nonlinear static analysis to estimate the global damage of bridge structures. The fragility functions consider the uncertainties both in the capacity in the form of material properties and the demand in the form of drag coefficient, and examine the ability of inundation depth, flow velocity and momentum flux to provide a reliable indication of the damage experienced by a non-ductile four-span bridge. The results showed that the velocity plays an important role as an intensity measure in the fragility analysis of non-ductile bridge structures.
