ABSTRACT
Soil-steel culverts and bridges are more and more often an element of road and railway infrastructure in Poland and the world. In many cases, using an appropriate soil cover depth over such structures is impossible, which is necessary to operate these objects safely. Therefore, the paper’s primary purpose is to assess the behaviour of the soil-steel culvert with a soil cover height of 0.20 m above the steel shell. This height of soil cover of structures is extremely low, below the requirements of standards (e.g., Canadian Standards). The tested soil-steel culvert has the following dimensions: (i) span 2.1 m, (ii) height 1.45 m, (iii) length 2.32 m, (iv) sheet thickness 2.5 mm, and the wave profile is 68×13 mm. Experimental tests were carried out in a laboratory in a specially constructed test box with dimensions of 2.32 m × 4.34 m × 2.49 m. As a result of the tests, the behaviour of this structure under static load was observed. A standardised static road load was used in the model tests of the soil-steel culvert. During the tests, the vehicle load was simulated by concentrated force (loading speed was 1 kN/s, and the maximum load duration was 600 seconds). The tests measured displacements and strains of the corrugated steel shell under a given load. The obtained results are of great cognitive importance, as similar studies have not been performed so far.
