NUMERICAL STUDY OF FLANGE BUCKLING BEHAVIOR OF HIGH-STRENGTH STEEL CORRUGATED WEB I-GIRDERS

Abstract

Steel plate girders with trapezoidal corrugated webs (TCWPGs) have been used over the last years around the world in many roadway and railway steel bridges as they can introduce several important advantages compared to flat web plate girders. The proper design of corrugated web girders depends mainly on the flexural and shear capacity of them. However, the flexural capacity is more important. Also, not many researchers studied the flexural capacity of such girders especially, when flange local buckling failure type (FLB) occurs in these corrugated web girders. In this paper, the flange local buckling behavior of steel trapezoidal corrugated web girders built up from high-strength steel (HSS) plates has been investigated to get the advantages of both the technique of corrugated web plates (CWPs) and the high-strength steel material (HSSs) together. A new numerical parametric study on four important parameters has been carried out to explain and investigate the flange local buckling behavior of high-strength steel corrugated web girders, considering mainly the influences of the flange to web thickness ratio, unsupported length of the compression flange, the corrugation angle and the initial imperfection magnitude of the compression flange on the behavior of girders with corrugated webs built up from HSSs. Using the commonly used finite element software ABAQUS, the results of the FE models have been obtained to be analyzed and discussed. Finally, some important advices have been introduced to aid the structural engineers to design such girders under flexural loading in economical manner.