Influence of flexure-shear interaction phenomena in seismic assessment of reinforced concrete piers

Seismic assessment of reinforced concrete (RC) bridges requires the ability to model the effective non-linear response and to identify the relevant failure modes of its main components, like the piers. The scope of this paper is to study the flexural-shear interaction phenomena in order to understand their influence on the behaviour of the struc-tures and to show how those phenomena can be implemented in a computational tool like those based on finite-element method. The analysis have been conducted within the Opensees framework that has already specific commands able to model the flexural-shear interaction phenomena. In the present research a specific model was developed, implementing some state-of-the-art simplified models aiming at capturing the complex interaction between shear and flexural damage mechanisms. Based on this model, a series of validation analysis have been performed, in order to verify the reliability of the formulation.