Flexural behavior of prestressed composite beams with corrugated web: Part I. Development and analysis

In this study, the prestressed composite beam with corrugated web has been developed, which is suitable for the long-span structure that enables a reduction in story height as well. Utilizing the corrugated steel web improves the efficiency of prestress introduced into the top and bottom flanges due to the accordion effect, which also provides better deflection control and greater resistance against local and out-of-plane buckling. Additionally, when the corrugated steel web becomes composite with concrete, the slanting plate of the corrugated web induces bearing stress that can improve composite action between the steel beam and the surrounding concrete. In this study, a parametric study on the accordion effect has been performed by a total of 24 corrugated webbed steel beams utilizing the finite element analysis. Based on the analysis result, a simple approach for the estimation of the accordion effect has been proposed. In addition, this study introduces a flexural behavior model for the prestressed composite beams with corrugated web. The verification of the proposed methods in this study is presented in a separated paper.