2D-Modeling of Accordion Effect in Corrugated Steel Web and its Applicability

Abstract

Prestressed concrete box girder with corrugated steel web is one of the promising concrete-steel hybrid structures applied to highway bridges. Prestress is efficiently induced into the top and bottom concrete flanges due to the so-called “accordion effect” of corrugated web. In this paper a simple 2-D analysis is presented to account for 3-D phenomena of the accordion effect using 2-D link-type elements. In the vertical direction, links are given a very high stiffness to fully transmit vertical shear force. In the horizontal direction, the link stiffness is given a value calculated from the out-of-plane bending of a folded plate forming each trapezoidal corrugation. Viability of the approach is demonstrated through comparison of experimental and numerical results on a large scale specimen of prestressed concrete beam with corrugated steel web.