RESEARCH ARTICLE
Comparative Experimental Study and FE Analysis of Corrugated Steel Pipe Culverts with Different Stiffness
Baodong Liu1, *, Zhen Wang2, Weibo Xu3, Haibo Sun4, Xiaoxi Wang1
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2016Volume: 10
First Page: 549
Last Page: 563
Publisher ID: TOCIEJ-10-549
DOI: 10.2174/1874149501610010549
Article History:
Received Date: 18/04/2016Revision Received Date: 02/08/2016
Acceptance Date: 16/08/2016
Electronic publication date: 30/09/2016
Collection year: 2016
open-access license: This is an open access article licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial 4.0 International Public License (CC BY-NC 4.0) (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/legalcode), which permits unrestricted, non-commercial use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the work is properly cited.
Abstract
This paper describes comparative experiment on corrugated steel pipe culverts with different stiffness. The two culverts both with 1.2m span and 4m backfill height but with different corrugation pattern and plate thickness were constructed side by side. Displacement, strain and soil pressure at critical points were tested during construction. Two-dimensional (2D) finite element (FE) models were established and the computed values were compared with measured values to verify the effectiveness of FE models and the reasonability of the test. The study shows that the deformation trend is the same but the deformations of the flexible pipe were much larger. Only after the backfill finished and the soil-structure bear the load together the FE simulation could basically reflect the stress state of the structure due to the nonlinearity of soil and the complexity of soil-structure interaction. The larger deformation of the flexible pipe makes the soil-structure interaction obvious, which reduces the pressure of backfill soil on the structure. Therefore realities should be considered when choosing corrugation pattern and thickness of corrugated plates to optimize design and save construction cost.