Composite soil–steel corrugated bridges, which are widely used in road, railway, and civil engineering, are recognized as durable, sustainable, and cost-effective structures. Due to their interactions with the surrounding soil, relatively thin corrugated steel plates are usually used in these bridges. Larger spans are associated with larger cross-sections, and deep corrugations with a 500 mm pitch and a 237 mm depth are already in use worldwide. However, the behavioral benefits of high-strength steel and additional strengthening elements for CSS structures have rarely been investigated with regard to local buckling in the straight regions of the corrugation. This study analyzed the influence of high-strength steel and innovative corrugated cross-sections strengthened with circular steel pipes on the utilization ratio of steel plates in composite soil–steel structures. Two-dimensional numerical models of three bridges with spans of 26 m, 17.5 m, and 12 m and surrounded by soil were developed to identify internal forces from permanent and temporary actions. Plate utilization was designed according to the Swedish, Canadian, and American methods, considering local buckling in the 500 × 237 mm and 381 × 140 mm corrugation profiles. It was found that the use of higher-strength steel material, as well as the introduction of steel pipes, significantly reduced the plate thickness of regular corrugations. The results show that the use of higher-strength steel reduced the cross-section area of regular and innovative corrugations by 30–40%. Moreover, the cross-section area of the innovative profile was 5% to 36% lower than that of the regular corrugation profile. Nevertheless, the results show that the local buckling approach proposed by the Swedish design method could be considered conservative and should be revised. In addition, the method of preventing local buckling by reducing the plastic moment capacity could be neglected when using thicker plates and lower steel grades.
Bareikis et al. (Thu,) studied this question.