Shear capacity of a novel joint between corrugated steel web and concrete lower slab

Composite girder with corrugated steel web is one of the promising concrete-steel hybrid structures with superior properties and cost effectiveness widely applied in highway and railway bridges. The connection between concrete slabs and corrugated steel web is an important part of such composite structure. In order to improve pouring quality and durability of concrete for joint structure between corrugated steel webs and concrete lower slab, the validity of placing lower slab on the inner side of corrugated steel webs was confirmed and a new joint structure with perforated plate connectors was proposed. Push-out tests on proposed joint structure with different parameters including the welding width and the plate thickness were carried out to study their shear strength, shear stiffness, failure modes and relative slip characteristics. Subsequently, three-dimensional finite element models taking material non-linearity and nonlinear contact between steel and concrete interface into consideration were built and validated by the push-out tests. Afterwards, parametric studies were performed to further investigate the influences of geometrical parameters (such as width, height and thickness of perforated steel plate) and material parameters including steel yielding strength and concrete compressive strength on ultimate shear strength and failure mode of the joint structure. Analytical results indicate that the shear loading capacity is increased with the thickness, the width and height of perforated plate, and the compressive strength of concrete. However, steel yielding strength, presence or absence of perforating rebar, have a negligible effect on ultimate shear strength of the joint structure. Finally, prediction equations of shear capacity were provided and compared with experimental and numerical results. The calculated shear capacity agrees well with experimental and numerical ones, indicating provided analytical equations can accurately predict shear capacity for such novel joint structure.