The bending capacity of box culvert for railway tracks

Abstract

The Trans-Sulawesi railway is a system of railway that was built to reach important areas on the Sulawesi island. In the construction of the Makassar-Parepare segment II railroad line between Barru-Palanro along a 45 km long many complementary buildings will be built, one of that is 26 underpass units/box culvert. This box culvert was chosen because the area between Makassar to Pare-pare often floods that can make the railway track will be disturbed. In addition, box culvert also functions as a crossing building. This paper aims to evaluate the bending capacity of the box culvert under railway track. Two box culvert precast concrete specimens with dimensions of 2000 mm × 2000 mm × 1000 mm with a wall thickness of 250 mm, and were given a monotonic static load. The bending test results obtained an initial crack load of 102 kN and 119.7 kN on BC-1 and BC-2 specimens, respectively. This initial crack load is greater than the crack load design (Pcrack) which is 76.8 kN. The loading is stopped at a load of 420 kN even though the specimen has not yet reached the ultimate load, due to device limitations. Nevertheless, the maximum load achieved by the two specimens exceeds the design ultimate load (Pult) of 227.2 kN.