Structural assessment of bridge columns with engineered cementitious composites and Cu-Al-Mn superelastic alloys

•Structural analysis of bridge columns with high-performance materials.•Constitutive model development for simulation of ECC and SEA behavior.•Plastic hinge lengths and strain distributions in novel bridge columns.•Energy absorption and permanent drift characteristics of novel bridge columns. Post-earthquake functionality of bridges is mainly affected by the residual deformations and damage level of the bridge columns. Recent earthquakes have shown that the bridge columns constructed based on current design regulations suffer large permanent deformations. Using high-performance materials such as super-elastic alloys (SEA) and engineered cementitious composites (ECC) has recently been proposed to address these issues. In this study, the performance of an innovative bridge column design incorporating ECC and Cu-Al-Mn (CAM) SEA bars is investigated under seismic loads. The behavior of ECC is simulated by introducing an experimentally calibrated constitutive model for concrete with smeared reinforcement. Additionally, a one-dimensional constitutive model is implemented to simulate the behavior of CAM SEA bars. A total of five different column configurations are modeled and the results are compared with the corresponding experimental data for validation purposes. The results are analyzed to understand the seismic behavior of these innovative columns in terms of lateral strength, post-peak degradation, permanent deformation, and shape of the hysteresis curves. Through numerical modeling, data are obtained and interpreted regarding the salient aspects of the structural behavior of these columns that could not be obtained through experiments.