Corrugated Steel Ellipse Culvert Response: Experimental Results Compared to Design Approaches
Publication: Journal of Pipeline Systems Engineering and Practice
Volume 14, Issue 2
Abstract
Design methods for corrugated steel culverts in current design standards consider the circumferential force in culvert walls (i.e., hoop thrust) to be the dominant load-carrying mechanism in these structures. However, recent studies have shown that bending moment, rather than thrust, is often the more dominant response for corrugated steel culverts under shallow burial conditions and vehicle loading. In addition, 2D finite element analyses have historically been unable to effectively capture the effects of discrete surface loads, such as wheel loads, on the response of buried metal culverts. To investigate these issues, the bending moment and thrust responses from an experiment involving an elliptical corrugated steel culvert under shallow burial conditions and simulated vehicle loading are compared with the bending moment and thrust estimates from the Canadian bridge design code and CANDE-2019 (a commonly used public domain finite element software package) and the thrust estimates from the American AASHTO LRFD bridge design code (which does not consider moment directly). The comparisons show that the Canadian code and CANDE-2019 models with a fine mesh and the continuous load scaling elasticity-based method appear to be the most effective for the investigated culvert and loading, while there is a need to modify the American AASHTO LRFD code to consider moment more directly. In addition, the results suggest that, under these conditions, the current approaches for estimating the peak bending moment response are more effective compared with the approaches for estimating the peak thrust response.
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Data Availability Statement
Some or all data, models, or code that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.
Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank the Canadian Foundation for Innovation and the Ontario Ministry of Research and Innovation for their generous financial support of the testing facilities used during this project. The experiments and the post-test analyses were funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.
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© 2023 American Society of Civil Engineers.
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Received: Aug 12, 2022
Accepted: Dec 8, 2022
Published online: Feb 13, 2023
Published in print: May 1, 2023
Discussion open until: Jul 13, 2023
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