Accordion effect of prestressed steel beams with corrugated webs

Various types of composite members have been developed to utilize the combined advantages of existing reinforced concrete and steel structures, and to actively improve ductility and serviceability of structural members. One of them is the hybrid-type steel beam, in which the prestressing method is applied to a steel beam. Introducing prestress to the existing I-shaped steel beam, however, results in a very low prestress efficiency due to the large axial stiffness of the section. On the other hand, if corrugated webs are used, the prestress introduced to the main flexural-resistant elements—the upper and lower flanges—gets larger due to the accordion effect, so that it is very advantageous not only in terms of serviceability, but also of achieving the improved flexural strength. Most previous studies on steel members with corrugated webs, however, have focused on the shear buckling strength of the corrugated webs, and few studies have been conducted on the accordion effect of the corrugated webbed beam to which prestress is introduced. Therefore, this research proposed two rational and theoretical models to quantitatively estimate the accordion effect, which is induced by the introduction of prestress to corrugated webbed steel beams, and performed experiments on two steel beams with corrugated webs and one with typical wide flange section. The experimental results showed that the prestressing efficiency of steel beams with corrugated webs increased more significantly than that of the steel beam with a typical web, and it is verified that the proposed methods are very simple and provide good agreements with the experimental results.