BEHAVIOUR OF SKEW BOX CULVERTS

Abstract

Box Culverts are very special type of structures. The uses for pre-cast concrete box culverts are endless. They can be used for underpasses, service tunnels, subways, outfalls, bridges, passageways, stream culverts and more. They are characterized by their simplicity in geometry and loading conditions. The reinforced concrete box culverts usually carry uniformly distributed dead load, vehicular live load to its surface and transfer same to the support by flexure, shear and torsion. Newly designed culverts are often skew. This is due to space constraints in congested urban areas. It can be also needed due to geographical constraints such as mountainous terrains. However force flow in skew box culverts is much more complicated than straight box culverts. Therefore careful investigation and numerical analysis needs to be performed, in which a skew box culvert can be modelled in several ways. Skewed box culverts are generally modelled using finite-element methods to study their behaviour under uniform and moving loads with to determine the most appropriate force response for design.