Torsional Behavior of Prestressed Concrete Box-Girder Bridges with Corrugated Steel Webs

Prestressed concrete box-girder bridges with corrugated steel webs is a major improvement on traditional prestressed concrete box-girder bridges. Steel webs, in stead of concrete webs, are efficient in reducing self-weight. Moreover, using corrugated webs allows one to avoid using stiffeners usually needed in flat plate webs and provides a convenient solution to the problem of prestress losses. Since the first prestressed concrete box-girder bridge with corrugated steel webs was built in France in 1986, the performance of this type of bridge has been receiving deserved attention and has proved its superiority over the others. In the past, however, most of the relevant studies were primarily concerned with the response of the corrugated steel webs. The flexural behavior of the bridge as a whole was not experimentally studied until 1998. This paper describes the experimental results of four scaled prestressed concrete box-girder bridges with corrugated steel webs subjected to torsion and presents an analytical model to predict the torsional behavior of such bridges. The Shinkai bridge in Japan was selected as the reference of the prototype. It is found that the torsional performance looks quite promising and that the analytical model fits the experimental results satisfactorily.