Analysis of Long Span Soil‐Steel Culvert

Soil–steel structures have been constructed as an alternative to short span concrete and steel bridges. They have some advantages regarding their construction methods, maintenance costs, and construction time. Several researchers have performed experimental and numerical studies about the behavior of these structures under dead loads and crossing live loads. This paper presents a study to investigate the variations of some geometrical parameters such as the culvert profile, culvert dimensions, and back fill soil cover thickness on the stability of culverts. A two dimensional finite element analysis for soil–steel culverts adopting the PLAXIS 2-D program were carried out. The position of the loaded truck were also studied. The Mohr–Coulomb constitutive model was considered in this simulation. Parametric analyses showed that the culvert profile and dimensions have significant influence on the stability of long span culverts; the backfill soil cover also highly affects the behavior of long span culverts.