Mechanical Behavior of Prefabricated Composite Box Girders with Corrugated Steel Webs under Static Loads

Abstract

This paper introduces a new type of bridge structure: the prefabricated composite box girder with corrugated steel webs, which features use of a composite upper flange and a prestressed tubular bottom flange filled with concrete. To understand the flexural behavior of this new structure, a static experiment was conducted on a 32-m-span tested girder with simply supported boundaries to investigate the deflection, strains, and bending capacity of it. Meanwhile, the tested girder and two hypothetical reference girders were theoretically analyzed according to elementary beam theory to obtain further insight into the flexural failure mechanism and the effectiveness of the different components. The experimental and theoretical results fit well, revealing that the bottom flange dominated the flexural capacity and the tested girder had sufficient bending resistances to meet the requirements specified in bridge design codes. A simplified equation for bending capacity was also proposed. The findings from this research may provide a reference for the application of this type of bridge structure.