A Study on Structural Stability and Suitability of Corrugated Long Span Soil-Steel Bridges

Abstract

Corrugated Soil-Steel bridges have been used as drainage structures and underpasses in the ongoing Southern Highway project. Because the Soil-Steel bridges are novel to Sri Lankan context and the catastrophic bridge failure at Poddala, 2009 led to a controversy about the suitability and the stability of Soil- Steel bridges. The structure safety against crushing failure of the corrugated steel arch was determined using finite element methods. Furthermore, even though the Soil-Steel bridges failed mainly due to the buckling of the corrugated plates and AISI guidelines, which had been used to design bridges in Sri Lanka, doesn’t cooperate versatile design procedure for the buckling failure. Therefore, the structural stability against crushing and buckling failure of the existing bridges (Long Span Type) with respect to the different fill heights were determined using finite element analysis.