In recent years there has been renewed interest on integral abutment bridges (IABs), mainly due to their low construction and maintenance cost. Owing to the monolithic connection between deck and abutments, there is strong soil‐structure interaction between the bridge and the backfill under both thermal action and earthquake shaking. Although some of the regions where IABs are adopted qualify as highly seismic, there is limited knowledge as to their dynamic behaviour and vulnerability under strong ground shaking. To develop a better understanding on the seismic behaviour of IABs, an extensive experimental campaign involving over 75 shaking table tests and 4800 time histories of recorded data, was carried out at EQUALS Laboratory, University of Bristol, under the auspices of EU‐sponsored SERA project (Seismology and Earthquake Engineering Research Infrastructure Alliance for Europe). The tests were conducted on a 5 m long shear stack mounted on a 3 m × 3 m 6‐DOF earthquake simulator, focusing on interaction effects between a scaled bridge model, abutments, foundation piles and backfill soil. The study aims at (a) developing new scaling procedures for physical modelling of IABs, (b) investigating experimentally the potential benefits of adding compressible inclusions (CIs) between the abutment and the backfill and (c) exploring the influence of different types of connection between the abutment and the pile foundation. Results indicate that the CI reduces the accelerations on the bridge deck and the settlements in the backfill, while disconnecting piles from the cap decreases bending near the pile head.

In earthquake engineering, structural models are validated by performing a time history analysis and comparing its maximum to the maximum response obtained by a shake table test. It has been shown that this is a sufficient (but not a necessary) precondition to accept a numerical model. Numerical models can fail to predict the planar rocking response of a rigid block, but may succeed in predicting the statistics of the response to an ensemble of ground motions. As seismic response is inherently stochastic, comparison of the statistics of the numerically simulated response to the statistics of the experimentally obtained benchmark response for the same ensemble of earthquake excitation is a sufficient (and easier to pass) model validation test. This article describes the publicly available data of a set of 12 free rocking vibration and 115 shake table tests of six three‐dimensional rocking and sliding columns, designed at ETH Zurich and performed at EQUALS Laboratory, University of Bristol. The data can be used to statistically validate different approaches that aim to model three‐dimensional rocking structures.