Full-scale experimental and numerical investigation on performance enhancement of slab bridge based on arched corrugated steel exoskeleton

As a widely used structure for small-span bridges, concrete slab bridges face an increasingly prominent risk of deterioration and even collapse due to heavy vehicle load and environmental corrosion, posing a serious threat to bridge safety. To address these challenges and meet growing transportation demands without disrupting traffic, an innovative active reinforcement method for small-span slab bridges based on Arch Corrugated Steel Exoskeleton (ACSE) is proposed in this paper. The proposed reinforcement approach enhances the load-bearing capacity by applying precompression to ACSE, allowing it to actively share both the dead and live load of the slab bridge. The reinforcement procedure and connections of ACSE to slab bridges are carefully designed. To evaluate the performance of this method, three full-scale experiments were conducted on 5-meter-span slabs. The results show that the ACSE method increases the flexural ultimate bearing capacity of the slab by 22.78 % and shares up to 60.00 % of the slab’s self-weight. Additionally, a numerical model for ACSE reinforcement is validated using experimental data and utilized to explore the feasibility of different ACS-slab connections as well as different arched corrugated steel (ACS) corrugations. Further parameter analysis reveals that the bearing capacity of the test slabs increases when the thickness and corrugation of the ACS increase. The dead load sharing effect of the ACSE is not significantly influenced by the connection type but is heavily affected by the applied precompression and the stiffness of the ACS. Moreover, the live load sharing effect becomes more pronounced with larger ACS plate thicknesses and cross-sectional sizes.