Overturning Resistance of Plain Concrete Piers in OSPG Railroad Bridges

The steel plate-girder bridges with concrete gravity piers have possibilities of overturning by lateral inertial force which can be reproduced by sudden earthquake attack. This paper explores an overturning mechanism of existing concrete gravity pier onto the sandy soil in the event of lateral push-over load by in-situ experimental observation. The in-situ push-over experiment for pier with earth anchors between spread footing and rock beds exhibits a reasonable enhancement of ductility against overturning. In unanchored system, a flexural crack at cold joint of concrete pier is not developed because of the over-turning of the pier. This leads a global instability (rotation) of pier-footing system with relatively low stresses in pier itself. While a lateral load is persistently increased in anchored system, the successive flexural cracking failure at cold joint is observed even after the local shear failure of soil due to redistribution of stress equilibrium between soil and pier structure as long as a tensile action of anchor cable is active.