Experimental Study on Shear Behavior of Trapezoidally Corrugated Steel Web

Trapezoidally corrugated plates have been used as the web in hybrid bridges such as prestressed concrete bridges and are expected to be used in plate girder bridges. Past research has shown that the corrugated webs can fail by local, global and interactive buckling modes. Different strength and design equations for each mode have been suggested and used for the design of hybrid bridges. However, the comparison of different equations showed the differences between equations. In this paper, a series of experiments have been performed to better define the buckling strength of corrugated webs. Non-linear finite element analysis, which consider both geometric and material non-linearity, was also performed before the tests and after the tests. The test and analysis results are compared and show that the finite element model used for the analysis is able to depict the test results to a good degree of accuracy. The results show that buckling stress depends on the ratio of local and global buckling stress.