Prestressed concrete bridges with corrugated steel webs: Nonlinear analysis and experimental investigation

Concrete bridges with corrugated steel webs and prestressed by both internal and external tendons have emerged as one of the promising bridge forms. In view of the different behaviour of components and the large shear deformation of webs with negligible flexural stiffness, the assumption that plane sections remain plane may no longer be valid, and therefore the classical Euler-Bernoulli and Timoshenko beam models may not be applicable. In the design of this type of bridges, both the ultimate load and ductility should be examined, which requires the estimation of full-range behaviour. An analytical sandwich beam model and its corresponding beam finite element model for geometric and material nonlinear analysis are developed for this type of bridges considering the diaphragm effects. Different rotations are assigned to the flanges and corrugated steel webs to describe the displacements. The model accounts for the interaction between the axial and flexural deformations of the beam, and uses the actual stress-strain curves of materials considering their stress path-dependence. With a nonlinear kinematical theory, complete description of the nonlinear interaction between the external tendons and the beam is obtained. The numerical model proposed is verified by experiments.