Research Projects

In crowded cities, flyover planning requires alignment to fit existing town plans, necessitating the use of curved girders to reduce overall structure costs. Understanding the behavior of these girders is crucial, as residual stresses are integral to beam capacity equations. This research aims to arrive at appropriate design capacity estimates for horizontally curved steel I-girders by considering changes in residual stresses due to conventional curving procedures, heat-curving and cold-curving. The existing guidelines for measuring and predicting residual stresses resulting from curving procedures are disconnected and insufficient. The proposed research aims to measure initial stresses resulting from heat-curving and cold-curving through experiments and implement them in finite element models to estimate curved girder capacities. These capacities are compared against those estimated based on assumed patterns provided across codes and literature. Design equations for curved I-girders will be developed for different curving procedures to find place in Indian and international standards. The findings from the current research will validate existing guidelines in terms of estimating girder capacities, using the methodology adopted in the current work. Additionally, the key differences between curving procedures and their feasibility must be adequately addressed to support the design process efficiently.