Institute of Fundamental Technological Research

The world has seen many kinds of natural disasters, which have critically influenced the residents' lives by causing damage to infrastructure. To realize rapid rescue efforts in an emergency situation, we propose a deployable emergency bridge, called Mobile Bridge TM [1], based on the theory of foldable structures[2]and the concept of Multi-Folding Microstructures (MFM)[3]. The current research presents the fundamental,numerical and experimental results obtained for the pedestrian and vehicle Mobile Bridges. In this paper, it is considered the localized linearization problem with the fixed an angle although this bridge contains a geometrical nonlinearity of scissors structure. Additionally, a seismic response analysis is conducted for the case where the Mobile Bridge is used in the disaster area as an emergency bridge. This allows for a better and safer structural design of the Mobile Bridge, which is patented in [4],[5].