Shear buckling behavior of tapered bridge girders with steel corrugated webs

The existing literature on bridge girders with steel corrugated webs (BGCWs) is focused on prismatic girders; i.e. with constant depth. To the authors’ best knowledge, no work has been done on the shear stability of tapered BGCWs although they have been increasingly used in bridges in recent years. Research presented in this paper focuses, first, on the critical shear buckling stress (τcr) of the corrugated webs of tapered BGCWs. This is made by carrying out elastic bifurcation buckling analyses using ABAQUS software on isolated corrugated webs with simple and fixed boundary conditions. Webs in different typologies of tapered girders with steel corrugated webs are considered. The corrugation dimensions of the considered corrugated webs are taken typical of those used in Shinkai and Matsnoki bridges. Opposite to prismatic corrugated webs which may buckle globally, it is found that the tapered corrugated webs buckle interactively without nothing buckling globally. It is additionally found that predicting τcr values for tapered webs based on prismatic web calculations are not accurate. Therefore, critical buckling stresses of the tapered webs based on the prismatic ones with different equation for each typology are proposed. The paper is, then, extended to investigate the nonlinear shear strengths of the BGCWs. The available design shear strength formulas for prismatic girders are compared with the FE shear strengths of the tapered BGCWs. Based on these comparisons, design strengths for the different cases of the tapered BGCWs are suggested. An illustrative example is given at the end to explain the application of the proposed predictions.