ABSTRACT
ABSTRACT: The use of high performance steel (HPS) in the construction of steel bridge girders in the USA has been growing steadily in recent years. HPS offers several improved properties over conventional bridge steels, including high strength, excellent fracture toughness, good weldability, and resistance to corrosion, which makes it well-suited for highway bridge applications. The use of HPS may lead to considerable weight savings in design (e.g., 15 to 20%), although design limits that impeded their effective use in conventional I-girders with transverse stiffeners include web instability, excessive deflections, and fatigue (Sause 1996). To overcome these limitations, unconventional I-girder systems have been proposed (Wassef et al. 1997, Sause & Fisher 1995), including I-shaped girders with corrugated webs (CWGs) and I-shaped girders with concrete-filled tubular flanges (CFTFGs), shown in Figure 1.
