Seismic fragility increment functions for deteriorating reinforced concrete bridges

Fragility increment functions are developed to estimate the seismic fragility of reinforced concrete (RC) bridges subject to deterioration due to the onset and progression of corrosion of the reinforcement. For each mode of failure considered, the fragility at time t of a deteriorating bridge is obtained by multiplying the initial fragility of the undeteriorated bridge by a corresponding increment function expressed in terms of the environmental conditions, the original material properties, time, a measure of the seismic demand, and a set of unknown model parameters. The developed increment functions account for the effects on the fragility estimates of the loss of the reinforcement and of the increasing uncertainty over time. As an application, the developed increment functions are used to estimate the seismic fragility of an example RC bridge. The proposed fragility increment functions are useful to estimate the fragility of deteriorating bridges without any extra reliability analysis once the fragility of the undeteriorated bridge is known. In particular, the proposed fragility increment functions can be used to assess the time-variant fragility of bridges for applications such as reliability-based design, life-cycle cost analysis, and risk analysis.