Experimental Investigation of Rehabilitated Steel Culvert Performance under Static Surface Loading
Publication: Journal of Geotechnical and Geoenvironmental Engineering
Volume 142, Issue 2
Abstract
An alternative approach to replacing corrugated steel culverts is to insert a new pipe inside the existing culvert and grout the space between them, a process known as sliplining. Though sliplining is a preferred rehabilitation approach among departments of transportation, very little research has been done to investigate the capacity enhancement provided by sliplining and how the load is shared between components in a sliplined culvert (i.e., the existing pipe, the liner, the grout, and the surrounding soil). A series of experiments was conducted on a deteriorated corrugated steel culvert at two different burial depths (600 and 900 mm) under surface loading before and after the culvert was rehabilitated with a grouted high density polyethylene (HDPE) slipliner. The rehabilitated culvert was found to be considerably stiffer and the diameter changes under surface load were reduced by more than 90% compared with the unrehabilitated culvert suggesting that the negative arching between the pipe and the soil has increased. The strains in the existing pipe were also reduced by more than 70% with negligible strain being measured in the invert of the culvert where the corrosion was concentrated. The results also indicated that when a neat grout with a compressive strength of approximately 30 MPa is used (what could be considered to be high strength in comparison with low density grouts featuring entrained air), the existing pipe and the grout carry most of the load, and the liner’s main role is to improve the hydraulic conductivity. Additionally, because of the increased stiffness of the rehabilitated pipe, the surrounding soil carries less of the surface load applied above the pipe.
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Acknowledgments
The authors gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, the Canada Foundation for Innovation, the Ministry of Research and Innovation Ontario, and the National Cooperative Highway Research Program of the Transportation Research Board (Washington, DC). Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the sponsors. The authors thank Sean Heidstra and KWH Pipe, Robert Cumming and Lafarge North America Inc. and Dave Pearson and the Ministry of Transportation Ontario for donating materials used in this research. Finally, the research would not have been possible without the assistance of Graeme Boyd, Van Thien Mai, and Ryan Regier.
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Information & Authors
Information
Published In
Journal of Geotechnical and Geoenvironmental Engineering
Volume 142 • Issue 2 • February 2016
Copyright
© 2015 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Dec 11, 2014
Accepted: Jul 17, 2015
Published online: Aug 31, 2015
Discussion open until: Jan 31, 2016
Published in print: Feb 1, 2016
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