Shear Strength of Trapezoidal Corrugated Steel Webs for Horizontally Curved Girder Bridges

Curved composite girder bridges with corrugated steel webs (CSWs) have already been constructed around the world. However, limited work has been done on their shear behavior. In this paper, the corrugated steel web (CSW) in horizontally curved girders (HCGs) is treated as an orthotropic cylindrical shallow shell, and the analytical formula for the elastic global shear buckling stress is deduced by the Galerkin method. Calculation tables for the global shear buckling coefficient for a four-edge simple support, for a four-edge fixed support, and for the two edges constrained by flanges fixed and the other two edges simply supported are given. Then, a parametric study based on a linear buckling analysis is performed to analyze the effect of the curvature radius and girder span on the shear buckling stress. Analytical and numerical results show that the difference of shear buckling stress of CSWs between curved girders and straight girders is small, so the shear design formulas for straight girders can be applied for curved girders. Finally, a series of tests were performed on three curved box girders with CSWs. Similar to CSWs in straight girders, the shear strain distributions of CSWs in HCGs are almost uniform along the direction of the web height and the principal strain direction angles are close to 45°. For the three specimens, CSWs carry about 76% of the shear force. In the destructive test, shear buckling after yielding occurred in all specimens which is in good agreement with the theoretical prediction, which means that the analytical formulas provide good predictions for the shear buckling stress of CSWs in HCGs and can be recommended for design purposes.

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