Lateral Elastic Stability of Slender Arches for Bridges Including Deck Slenderness

The effect of deck girder slenderness on the lateral buckling load of arched steel bridges is investigated in this article. Models in the literature consider the deck to be infinitely stiff out-of-plane: this reductive hypothesis is removed in this article, and a formulation describing the lateral behaviour of the slender tied arch in terms of two geometric parameters is proposed. A comparison with the relevant Eurocode 3 (EC3) instructions for preliminary stability checks shows that a correction function to include deck slenderness is necessary. Some modifications to code formulations are proposed.