Structural details of steel girder–abutment joints in integral bridges: An experimental study

Integral bridges, which have integrated superstructures and substructures, should essentially maintain the rigid behavior and structural safety of the various existing joints. Especially temperature sensitive, girder-abutment joints for integral steel bridges are steel–concrete composite structures and require sufficient rigid behavior. Yet, various design guidelines and standards do not state these specific designs or construction methods. This study proposes structural details of girder-abutment joints in integral steel bridges for enhanced rigid behavior and load-resisting and crack-resisting capacity. Thus, this study additionally suggests various joints that apply stud shear connectors and perfobond rib shear connectors to existing empirically constructed girder-abutment joints. This study verifies the performance and evaluates the behavior of the proposed steel girder-abutment joints through experimental loading tests of empirically constructed joint specimens and specimens of the proposed joints. Also, this study performs FE analysis (non-linear structural analysis), which applies contact interaction of the interface of the steel–concrete composite joints. As a result of the experimental loading test, all the existing empirical joints and the proposed joints demonstrated sufficient rigidity and crack-resisting capacity under required design and yield load and are applicable as girder-abutment joints for integral steel bridges. Moreover, the proposed joints are judged to be structurally superior to the empirically constructed joints by the results of analysis for load-displacement relationships, crack-propagation behaviors, and load-strain relationships. Like the proposed girder-abutment joints in this study, joints with improved rigid behavior and load-resisting and crack-resisting capacity may resolve and properly control durability and serviceability issues of integral bridges.

► Structural detail of steel girder-abutment joint in integral bridge.
► Propose new joint details with stud and perfobond rib shear connectors.
► Verify the performance of the proposed joints through loading tests.
► Proposed joints are shown to be structurally superior to the empirically constructed joint.