Development of a Proper Load Pattern for Nonlinear Static Analysis of Composite Girder Bridges under Blast

Bridges are important structures in a transportation system which may be one of the targets of terrorist attacks. Given the complexity of bridges against the blast, the purpose of this research is determining a suitable equivalent static load pattern for nonlinear analysis of composite steel deck bridges under the load of the blast. For this purpose, at first, the simulation of blast and modeling of bridges with composite decks have been performed and the accuracy of the proposed modeling method is evaluated. Then several samples of bridges with the composite deck under the load of the blast have been modeled with different intensities and nonlinear dynamic analysis is carried out on them. By proposing a suitable load pattern and after the nonlinear static analysis on all samples using displacement control, the equivalent static load factor to correct the desired pattern in each sample is calculated. Based on the results of the nonlinear analysis of the samples, a correlation for the equivalent static load factor is extracted and evaluated.