Plate Girders with Corrugated Steel Webs

Girders with corrugated steel webs represent a new innovative system which has emerged in the past decade, especially for short span bridges. The new system combines the usage of corrugated steel plates as webs and either steel or reinforced/prestressed concrete slabs as flanges. The flanges are assumed to provide the flexural strength of the girder with no contribution from the corrugated web, which is assumed to provide the entire shear capacity of the girder. The corrugated web is thus, subjected to an "almost" pure shear stress state. Failure of a corrugated steel web plate may occur by the classical steel yielding of the web under a pure shear stress state. It may also occur by web buckling due to either local instability of any "panel" between two folds or overall instability of the web over two or more panels. An interactive failure mode between these different failure criteria represents another possibility of failure. In this paper, the shear behavior of corrugated steel webs is explicitly investigated focusing on the different failure modes which affect the web design. A closed form solution (interaction equation) that considers local buckling, overall buckling and steel yielding of the web is presented. Numerical analyses based on the finite element technique are performed to investigate the buckling modes of the corrugated web and to verify the validity of the proposed interaction equation. The effect of different geometric parameters on the failure mode of the corrugated web is inspected using the proposed interaction equation. A nonlinear finite element model is then used to investigate the post-buckling strength of girders with corrugated steel webs.