Fatigue strength of flange-to-web welded detail in corrugated web girders

Book chapter, 2025

Corrugated web steel girders have lately gained increasing popularity in both building and bridge applications due to their efficient use of material. Previous research and applications have demonstrated that bridge girders with corrugated webs offer a promising solution for composite road bridges. There is, however, no rules or regulations in design standards covering the fatigue strength of this type of girders. In particular, the dependency of fatigue strength on the geometrical properties of the corrugated web has not been well established.
This paper aims at deriving detail categories for the flange-to-web weld detail in beams with trapezoidal corrugated webs. Fatigue tests with 86 specimens were collected and analyzed. The tests data were categorized by corrugation angle, resulting in four proposed detail categories. Additionally, finite element (FE) analyses were performed on 65 of these tests using hot spot stress (HSS) and effective notch stress (ENS) methods to derive fatigue stresses. The results indicate that DC225 and DC100 with maximum principal stress, as per IIW guidelines for ENS and HSS assessment methods respectively, are suitable for these beams; however, DC100 with HSS appears to be conservative for the analyzed dataset.