SECED 2015 was a two-day conference on Earthquake and Civil Engineering Dynamics that took place on 9-10th July 2015 at Homerton College, Cambridge.
This was the first major conference to be held in the UK on this topic since SECED hosted the 2002 European Conference on Earthquake Engineering in London.
The conference brought together experts from a broad range of disciplines, including structural engineering, nuclear engineering, seismology, geology, geotechnical engineering, urban development, social sciences, business and insurance; all focused on risk, mitigation and recovery.
SECED 2015 featured the following keynote speakers (affiliations correct at the time of the conference):
SECED allows the self-archiving of the Author Accepted Manuscripts (AAM) from the SECED 2015 Conference. This means that all authors can make their conference paper available via a green open access route. The full text of your paper may become visible within your personal website, your institutional repository, a subject repository or a scholarly collaboration network signed up to the voluntary STM sharing principles. It may also be shared with interested individuals, for teaching and training purposes at your own institution and for grant applications (please refer to the terms of your own institution to ensure full compliance).
To deposit your AAM, please adhere to the following conditions:
SECED allows authors to deposit their AAM under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial International Licence 4.0 (CC BY-NC 4.0). The deposit must clearly state that the AAM is deposited under this licence and that any reuse is allowed in accordance with the terms outlined by the licence. To reuse the AAM for commercial purposes, permission must be sought by contacting seced@ice.org.uk. For the sake of clarity, commercial usage would be considered as, but not limited to:
Should you have any questions about our licensing policies, please contact seced@ice.org.uk.

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Bridges are one of the most critical components of any transport infrastructure network, and their serviceability during earthquakes is vital to ensure the safety of society. To be able to overcome bridge failure, code committees started to focus on different methods to design bridges under the effect of seismic forces. One of the challenges associated with Eurocode 8 and AASHTO-LRFD, which is not effectively addressed by code committees, is to withstand the failure of irregular bridges with unequal pier heights from seismic forces.
EC8 currently uses “moment demand-to-moment capacity” ratios to insure simultaneous failure of piers on bridges supported by piers of unequal heights, while AASHTO-LRFD relies on the relative effective stiffness of the piers. These regulations are not entirely valid, especially for bridges with piers of relative height of 0.5 or less, where in the case of earthquakes, they can experience a combination of shear and flexure failure modes. In this case, the shorter piers often result in a brittle shear failure, while longer piers are most likely to fail due to flexure.
This study aims to evaluate the adequacy of EC8 and AASHTO-LRFD design procedures for regular seismic behavior, by modeling various irregular bridges using shear-critical fiber-based beam-column elements. In this work the behavior of several irregular monolithic and bearing-type bridges is investigated. In addition, different methods of regularizing the bridge performance are examined in order to balance damage, with the ultimate aim of obtaining a simultaneous or near-simultaneous failure for all piers irrespective of the different heights and failure modes experienced.