Grant: Collaborative Research and Development Grants

Culverts are used to convey water, utilities, or pedestrians through embankments and they areconsidered as a strategic part of the urban infrastructure for all societies. Three-sided culverts are gaining popularity as an alternative to box culverts owing to their advantages, including: quick installation; ease of construction; reduced cost compared to box culverts; and minimal impact on the aquatic environment. They are currently designed in accordance with common practice of reinforced concrete with assumed earth pressure distribution as box culverts, which leads to an overly conservative design. Therefore, this research aims to: understand the behavior of three sided culverts and the factors that affect their behavior, establish their actual loading conditions and develop special guidelines for their design based on full scale field measurements. Many factors are expected to influence the interaction of precast concrete three-sided structures with the surrounding soil, such as: culvert shape, structure stiffness, embedment depth, and foundation rigidity. These factors will affect the applied earth loads (vertical and lateral) as well as thrusts, shear forces and bending moments applied to the structural elements and consequently their design. It is expected the research will establish a robust, yet simplified design method for three sided culverts and examine the applicability and limitations of the current standard of practice design methods of three sided culverts.The findings from this research will result in reliable and cost effective design of three-sided culverts.The precast concrete products used in transportation in the USA amount to $2.0B (Freedonia Group, 2018) with the Canadian market is approximately $200M.