Ductile steel plate external end diaphragms for steel tub girder straight highway bridges

The end diaphragm of bridges are normally designed to resist lateral seismic forces imposed on the superstructure in earthquake prone regions. Using ductile diaphragms with high deformation capacity could reduce the seismic demands on the substructure and prevent costly damage under strong ground motions. The end diaphragms of steel tub girder bridges with high lateral stiffness and dominant shear behavior have a potential to be used as ductile fuse elements. In this study, a steel plate shear diaphragm (SPSD) is introduced as an external end diaphragm of tub girder steel bridges to reduce the seismic demands imposed on the substructure. Quasi static nonlinear analyses were conducted to evaluate responses of sixteen SPSDs with different boundary conditions, aspect ratios and diaphragm plate thicknesses. Moreover, nonlinear time history analyses were performed using three different ground motions corresponding to DBE and MCE level spectrums. Cyclic and time history analyses proved the proper behavior of SPSD and its efficiency to reduce seismic demands by more than 25%.