Torsional behavior of prestressed concrete box-girder bridges with corrugated steel webs

The type of prestressed concrete box-girder bridges with corrugated steel w ebs is a major improvement on traditional prestressed concrete box-girder b ridges. First of all, steel webs, instead of concrete webs, are efficient i n reducing self-weight. Moreover using corrugated webs allows one to avoid using stiffeners usually needed in flat plate webs, and provides a convenie nt solution to the problem of prestress lasses. 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 ifs superiority over the others. In the past, how ever most of the relevant studies were primarily concerned with the respons e of the corrugated steel webs. The flexural behavior of the bridge as a wh ole was not experimentally studied until 1998. This paper describes the exp erimental results of four scaled prestressed concrete box-girder bridges wi th corrugated steel webs subjected to torsion, and presents an analytical m odel to predict the torsional behavior of such bridges. It is found that th e torsional performance looks quite promising and that the analytical model fits the experimental results satisfactorily.