CEE Ph.D. Defense Announcement: Performance-based Earthquake Engineering of Ordinary Bridges Accounting for the Damage Accumulated from Fire Hazards

Abstract: Wildland fire is an undercharacterized structural hazard to bridges, particularly in California, where seismic and wildfire risks coincide. This thesis develops a probabilistic multi-hazard framework that quantifies the seismic demand on ordinary reinforced concrete bridge columns following wildland fire exposure. A validated thermo-mechanical simulation pipeline connects fire intensity to post-fire structural capacity, and an Alternating Least Squares algorithm back-calculates the latent fire damage from combined seismic response across 19,000 column-fire combinations. The resulting three-step demand model links column period, fire intensity and spectral acceleration to the post-fire Damage Index, with the ISO area equivalency factor φ(A_ISO) identified as the optimal fire intensity measure.