Design of horizontally curved plate girder webs containing circular openings

A simple design method to predict the ultimate shear capacity of horizontally curved plate girder webs containing centrally placed circular openings, and subjected to shear is presented in this paper. The solution is obtained by incorporating the effects of curvature and opening size to an equilibrium equation for straight girders containing web openings. It is observed from a parametric study that ultimate load carrying capacity drops linearly with increasing degree of curvature for curved girders having smaller web openings. No significant drop in ultimate capacity is, however, observed when the web opening size exceeds half of the web depth. Accuracy of the proposed equation is assessed by comparing the results with the corresponding finite element values as well as with available experimental results. A satisfactorily correlation has been observed.