Comparative Study on Seismic Performance of Prestressed Concrete Box-girder Bridges with Corrugated Steel Webs

Prestressed concrete (PC) box-girders with corrugated steel webs are one of the promising steel concrete composite structures applied to highway bridges. Although the basic structural characteristics including bending, shearing and torsion, etc., have been paid much attention, few researches on the seismic performance of this type of bridges are found, especially when the span of this type of bridges becomes larger and larger. In this paper, the seismic performance of one long-span PC box-girder bridge with corrugated steel webs is studied and compared with a conventional box-girder bridge with concrete webs, based on response spectrum analysis using ANSYS. The results show that, the vertical and transverse displacements of the box-girder with corrugated steel webs are slightly less than those of the box-girder with concrete webs, but the longitudinal displacement reverses, under the same earthquake excitation. The bending moments of representative sections of the box-girder bridge with corrugated steel webs are only about 70% similar to 90% of those of the corresponding conventional PC girder bridge. The results indicate that the box-girder bridge will have better seismic performance if the corrugated steel webs are adopted instead of the concrete webs, but it could also fulfill the tasks such as displacement control which resulted from stiffness reduction.