Seismic Performances of Mountainous Continuous Rigid Frame Solid and Hollow Pier Railway Bridges

This paper focuses on the seismic performance of mountainous railway bridges having different pier type i.e. rectangular hollow piers and solid piers. The piers used were of same materials and inertial properties. For this, 3-D FEM models of these bridges were created by ANSYS 15.0. For seismic assessment, Response Spectrum and Dynamic Time-History Analysis methods were adopted. Different types of earthquake waves used were Elcentro, Wenchuan and Nepal earthquakes, all normalized to 0.3 g Peak Ground Acceleration (PGA). The study concluded that even though the hollow pier bridges are susceptible to large displacements, its dealing with internal forces is remarkable compared to solid pier bridges.