Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

Keeping bridge infrastructure in safe and operational condition is a major challenge for most countries. Recently a number of bridges have collapsed in North America and around the world, which indicates their increased risks of failure under different hazards. Over its lifetime, a bridge must withstand multiple hazards, some of which occur concurrently and have cascading effects. Extreme climate and natural hazard events are rare and occur largely unanticipated. These events not only cause economic losses by damaging infrastructure and other facilities but also adversely affect post-disaster response capability. Earthquakes in Christchurch, New Zealand, the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami of 2011 in Japan, and the most recent Typhoon Jebi of 2018 in Japan caused severe losses and damage to highway bridges that shook the national economies. Currently available codes and guidelines are adequate in addressing individual issues related to resilient bridge design, but fail in addressing the complexities in a multihazard environment (mainshock-aftershock; earthquake-tsunami; earthquake-flooding), where these dependencies exist at multiple levels. In the wake of frequent extreme natural hazards around the globe, increased emphasis has been placed on identifying methods to improve infrastructure safety and performance at reasonable costs, with minimal undesirable side effects. Strong interest from the bridge owners and designers on this aspect has led to the development of the concept of “multihazard design”. Although some experimental and numerical research has been done in the field of multihazard design, it is a relatively new topic in engineering, thus providing considerable room for future research. The proposed research program is designed to develop a performance-based approach for multihazard resilient bridge systems to ensure enhanced resilience and robustness, thus minimizing the adverse social and economic impacts of multiple hazards. This research will focus on identifying synergies between hazards that make an integrated multihazard design approach possible through a structured design process. Successful completion of the proposed research will yield design guidelines for practicing design engineers in designing resilient bridges that can accommodate independent or concurrent multiple hazards. The proposed program will not only provide adequate guidelines and numerical tools for practitioners to design and analyze bridges against multiple hazards, but also develop innovative smart structural components to enhance structural safety. By adopting and integrating such innovative smart structural components with performance based design approaches, Canada's highway infrastructure resilience will be significantly improved and Canadian communities will be provided with economical, safe, and low-risk bridges when subjected to extreme natural hazards.