SHEAR STRENGTH OF HORIZONTALLY CURVED PLATE GIRDER WEB PANELS WITH TRANSVERSE STIFFENERS

Horizontally curved I-shaped plate girders are often used in roadway bridges. Although current design codes are focused on curved box-shaped girders, they provide no explicit design approach for curved I-shaped web panels subjected to pure shear. In this paper the analysis of curved I-shaped web panels under pure shear was conducted using the finite element program, ANSYS. A comprehensive parametric analysis was conducted to evaluate the effect of web curvature on elastic buckling and ultimate shear strength. The analysis revealed that the elastic buckling load of horizontally curved web panels may exceed that of an identical straight web panels by more than 10%. On the other hand, the percentage increase in the ultimate shear strength due to horizontal web curvature was pronounced in the inelastic buckling range and may reach 8%. Therefore, a new set of design rules were proposed by introducing an amplification factor to the web buckling coefficient of straight plate girders to account for the effect of horizontal curvature. The new design rules provided a good estimation of the shear strength of curved web panels determined from the numerical solution.