Fatigue life of girders with trapezoidally corrugated webs: An experimental study

Corrugated steel plate has been increasingly used in the last 20 years for beam webs in hybrid and composite bridges. Girders with corrugated webs have many advantages over traditional structures with flat webs, but due to the new structural layout, there are still many design questions that need to be solved. In cases with girders with trapezoidally corrugated webs, the determination of the fatigue life is rather difficult because of the complex stress field in the flanges, and the fatigue detail category has also not been elucidated. This topic has gained importance in Hungary related to a highway bridge on the Tisza River designed and constructed between 2006 and 2011. There are only a small number of investigations dealing with the fatigue behaviour of corrugated web girders in the literature. The aim of the current tests published in this paper is the analysis of the fatigue behaviour of the corrugated web girders under pure bending and combined bending and shear. Furthermore, a proposal for the fatigue detail category is developed based on the test results to support the bridge design. The tests were completed to study the effect of the corrugation profile, the normal stress ratio, the effect of the combined normal and shear stresses and the weld size on the fatigue life.