Girders with corrugated steel webs: buckling modes and numerical modelling

Steel and composite beams with corrugated steel webs represent a new innovative system, which has recently emerged for short and medium span bridges. The new system may combine the usage of corrugated steel plates as webs and steel or reinforced/prestressed concrete slabs as flanges for plate- or boxgirders. Conceptually, the flanges of the new system solely provide the flexural strength of the beam with no contribution from the corrugated web. On the other hand, the corrugated web provides the shear capacity of the system. Failure of a corrugated steel web plate may occur by the classical steel yielding of the web under pure shear stress state, by web buckling or in an interactive mode between buckling and yielding. An equation which represents the interactive failure mode of the corrugated web plate is introduced. Then, a linear elastic finite element analysis is performed to investigate the buckling modes of the corrugated plates.