Structural details of steel girder-abutment joints in integral bridges: An experimental study

Integral bridges, which have integrated superstructures and substructures, should essentially maintain the rigid behavior and structural safety of the various existing joints. Especially temperature sensitive, girder-abutment joints for integral steel bridges are steel-concrete composite structures and require sufficient rigid behavior. Yet, various design guidelines and standards do not state these specific designs or construction methods. This study proposes structural details of girder-abutment joints in integral steel bridges for enhanced rigid behavior and load-resisting and crack-resisting capacity. Thus, this study additionally suggests various joints that apply stud shear connectors and perfobond rib shear connectors to existing empirically constructed girder-abutment joints. This study verifies the performance and evaluates the behavior of the proposed steel girder-abutment joints through experimental loading tests of empirically constructed joint specimens and specimens of the proposed joints. Also, this study performs FE analysis (non-linear structural analysis), which applies contact interaction of the interface of the steel-concrete composite joints. As a result of the experimental loading test, all the existing empirical joints and the proposed joints demonstrated sufficient rigidity and crack-resisting capacity under required design and yield load and are applicable as girder-abutment joints for integral steel bridges. Moreover, the proposed joints are judged to be structurally superior to the empirically constructed joints by the results of analysis for load-displacement relationships, crack-propagation behaviors, and load-strain relationships. Like the proposed girder-abutment joints in this study, joints with improved rigid behavior and load-resisting and crack-resisting capacity may resolve and properly control durability and serviceability issues of integral bridges.