Local Buckling Analysis of Innovative Corrugated Profile of Soil-Steel Composite Bridges

Corrugated soil-steel composite bridges due to their out-of-plane stiffness and interaction with surrounding soil are extensively used in the underground engineering. The demand for larger span of corrugated soil-steel structures is rising due to their high strength-to-cost ratio. Larger spans are usually related to the bigger cross-sections of corrugation profile. The use of the deepest corrugations like 500 mm pitch and 237 mm depth is associated with a higher risk of local buckling of straight region (tangent mt) of corrugation. This study analyses the resistance to local buckling of four widely used corrugation profiles. It also examines the impact of circular hollow section steel pipes and high strength steel influence on plate width-to-thickness ratio limit. The numerical three-dimensional model was developed for the investigation. At first, parametric study was conducted to reveal the influence mechanisms on critical parameters, incorporating finite element mesh size, number of corrugations, plate height, and plate thickness. Afterwards, local buckling behaviour of corrugated steel plate was studied and width-to-thickness ratio limit was proposed considering that local buckling of the plate would not occur before steel yielding. It was found that corrugated plate thickness could be significantly reduced as a result of the reduction of buckling length by steel pipes. Therefore, innovative corrugation profile has the great potential to be rational more than the increase of the thickness of the regular corrugated steel plate.