Flexural ductility of reinforced and prestressed concrete sections with corrugated steel webs

Abstract

Prestressed concrete bridges with corrugated steel webs have emerged as one of the promising bridge forms. This structural form provides excellent structural efficiency with the concrete flanges primarily taking bending and the corrugated steel webs primarily taking shear. In the design of this type of bridges, the flexural ductility and deformability as well as strength need to be carefully examined. Evaluation of these safety-related attributes requires the estimation of full-range behaviour. In this study, the full-range behaviour of beam sections with corrugated steel webs is evaluated by means of a nonlinear analytical method which uses the actual stress-strain curves of the materials and considers the path-dependence of materials. In view of the different behaviour of components and the large shear deformation of corrugated steel webs with negligible longitudinal stiffness, the assumption that plane sections remain plane may no longer be valid. The interaction between shear deformation and local bending of flanges may cause additional stress in flanges, which is considered in this study. The numerical results obtained are compared with experimental results for verification. A parametric study is undertaken to clarify the effects of various parameters on ductility, deformability and strength.