The American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials is developing new recommendations for bridge designs that can better withstand earthquakes. These new guidelines use pushover analysis, a technique where a computer model of a structure is subjected to increasing lateral loading until its components fail. Pushover analysis is an effective way to highlight any weakness in a bridge's performance under earthquake conditions. However, there is no single, easy-to-use program available to design engineers. No programs focus on the bridge bent design (sometimes called a pier design) most commonly used in Alaska, where steel shells encase reinforced concrete columns to improve seismic performance. This project developed software customized for pushover analysis of Alaska-style bridge bents.
