
On the integrated shear strength of corrugated web composite girders
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Steel corrugated webs are used in building and bridge engineering due to their numerus favorable properties. In building engineering they are applied with steel flanges, however, in bridge engineering they are applied together with concrete upper and steel or concrete lower flanges. The conservative international design practice follows the recommendations of the current international literature and standards that the full cross-section shear strength, namely the integrated shear strength, can be considered by the shear strength of the corrugated web. In the case of pure steel structures the appropriateness of this assumption is verified for normal strength steel. Combining the steel corrugated web with reinforced concrete flanges the number of researches in literature is limited and there is no existing design methods. This structural layout is called “hybrid” structure according to the terminology of the international literature. Composite girders have upper concrete flange and steel web and bottom flange. The previous experimental and advanced FE model based investigations showed that the contribution of the concrete flange is significant to the initial shear stiffness, to the shear strength of the full cross-section, to the shear buckling mode of corrugated web and to the postcritical behavior. The aim of the study is to understand the shear behavior of composite girders. In this research numerical analyses are carried out and the results are compared with previous full-scale experimental test results performed at Budapest University of Technology and Economics. As a result, the contribution of the concrete flange are presented to the initial stiffness, to the shear strength and to the postcritical behavior of the composite girder.