Prefabricated construction is attracting increasing interest in recent years, since this construction method has various advantages as compared to the cast-in-situ construction method, such as less construction time, higher quality control and reduced environmental impact. As a typical type of prefabricated structures, precast segmental column (PSC) has been used as the substructure to accelerate the construction speed of bridges. This paper reviews the performances of the PSCs under seismic loadings. In particular, the seismic performances of the PSC itself under cyclic loading and real earthquake ground motions, the seismic behaviours of PSC-supported bridge structures, and the responses of precast rocking column (PRC)-supported bridges, are comprehensively reviewed and their pros and cons are discussed. For the completeness of the paper, the performances of the PSCs under multiple dynamic hazards, namely impact and blast loadings here are also briefly summarized at the end of this paper.

Environmental vibration pollution has serious negative impacts on human health. Among the various contributors to environmental vibration pollution in urban areas, rail transit vibration stands out as a significant source. Consequently, addressing this issue and finding effective measures to attenuate rail transit vibration has become a significant area of concern. An infilled trench can be arranged periodically along the propagation paths of the waves in the soil to attenuate vibration waves in a specific frequency range. However, the periodic infilled trench seems to be unsatisfactory for providing wide band gaps at low and medium frequencies. To improve the isolation performance of wave barriers at low to medium frequencies, a buried PT-WIB consisting of a periodic infilled trench and a wave impedance block barrier has been proposed in this paper. A three-dimensional finite element model has been developed to evaluate the isolation performance of three wave barriers. The influence of the PT-WIB’s parameters on isolation performance has been analyzed. The results indicate that the combined properties of the periodic structure and the wave impedance block barrier can effectively achieve a wide attenuation zone at low and medium frequencies, enhancing the isolation performance for mitigating environmental vibration pollution.