Comparative Experimental Study and FE Analysis of Corrugated Steel Pipe Culverts with Different Stiffness

This paper describes comparative experiment on corrugated steel pipe culverts with different stiffness. The two culverts both with 1.2m span and 4m backfill height but with different corrugation pattern and plate thickness were constructed side by side. Displacement, strain and soil pressure at critical points were tested during construction. Two-dimensional (2D) finite element (FE) models were established and the computed values were compared with measured values to verify the effectiveness of FE models and the reasonability of the test. The study shows that the deformation trend is the same but the deformations of the flexible pipe were much larger. Only after the backfill finished and the soil-structure bear the load together the FE simulation could basically reflect the stress state of the structure due to the nonlinearity of soil and the complexity of soil-structure interaction. The larger deformation of the flexible pipe makes the soil-structure interaction obvious, which reduces the pressure of backfill soil on the structure. Therefore realities should be considered when choosing corrugation pattern and thickness of corrugated plates to optimize design and save construction cost.