Torsional behavior of prestressed concrete box bridges with corrugated steel webs

The type of prestressed concrete box bridges with corrugated steel webs is a major improvement on traditional presstressed concrete box-girder bridges. First of all, steel webs instead of concrete webs are certainly efficient in reducing self-weight. Moreover, the use of corrugated webs can not only avoid the need of stiffeners easily, but also provide a convenient solution to the problem of prestress losses. Since the first prestressed concrete box bridge with corrugated steel web was built in France in 1986, the performance of this type of bridges has been receiving deserved attention and proving its superiority over the others. In the past, however, most of the relevant studies were primarily concerned with the response of the corrugated steel webs. The flexural behavior of the structure as a whole was not experimentally studied until 1998. This paper describes the experimental results of four scaled prestressed concrete box bridges with corrugated steel webs subjected to torsion. It is found that the torsional performance looks quite promising in any aspects.