Effects of Soil Cover, Water Table Elevation, and Erosion Voids on the Live Load Response of Corrugated Steel Culverts
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis investigates the structural behaviour of corrugated steel pipe culverts under simulated vehicle loading with a focus on developing a better understanding of the effects of shallow burial depths, erosion voids, and water table elevation on the live load response. A horizontal ellipse culvert was tested under single wheel pair loads at 6 different burial depths ranging from 0.1 m to 1.2 m. The culvert’s strain response (measured with fibre optic sensors) was used to calculate the experimental bending moment and thrust responses around the circumference, which revealed that the structure’s bending moment response was consistently the dominant live load response, rather than the thrust at all burial depths. The results of this experiment were then compared to the bending moment and thrust responses estimated using the current Canadian and American bridge design standards, as well as the responses estimated using CANDE-2019 (a commonly used finite element analysis package). The comparison indicated that the Canadian code and CANDE-2019 were the most effective methods for estimating the culvert’s bending moment response under shallow burial conditions. To study the effects of erosion voids, the Deep Burial Simulator facility at Queen’s University was modified to allow for a water table to be established within the pit. This permitted an experimental study where erosion voids developed adjacent to a circular corrugated steel pipe due to water and soil infiltration into the structure through perforations created at the haunch positions. The results suggest that erosion voids lead to a greater change in the bending moment response under simulated vehicle loading compared to the thrust response, and this can also cause the location of the peak moment response to relocate to the position adjacent to the erosion void. A second experiment was also conducted in this facility, which involved applying simulated vehicle loads to the surface above the corrugated steel pipe with air-dried soil conditions, high water table conditions (with a phreatic surface 0.6 m above the crown), and low water table conditions (where the phreatic surface was lowered back to the invert). The results indicate that high water table conditions caused a significant reduction in the soil modulus compared to the other two water table scenarios, which led to approximately two times higher peak bending moments with high water table conditions versus the other two scenarios.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".