Professor Dr. Halim Kadhim Hussein and Professor Dr. Farid Hamid Majeed, both from the Civil Engineering Department at the College of Engineering, University of Basrah, along with PhD student and lecturer Ali Abdul Zahra Hassan, a faculty member at the Technical Institute/Amarah, Southern Technical University, co-authored a research paper titled: "Experimental Study of Cold-Formed Steel Bridge Girders in Various Shapes Under Static Loads." The paper was published in the Civil Engineering Journal, an international scientific journal indexed in Scopus and Clarivate, ranked in the first quartile (Q1) of global scientific journal rankings, and holding a CiteScore of 7.3.

To facilitate accelerated bridge construction and reduce the cost of bridge design and construction, a cold-formed steel composite bridge girder has been suggested recently as an economical alternative. The new technology for the composite bridge girder includes a cold-formed steel plate and either a precast or cast-in-place reinforced concrete (RC) slab. Previous research on cold-formed steel concrete composite girders has introduced two new shapes for short-span bridge girders: a cold-formed steel tub girder and a folded plate girder system. No study has been conducted on the impact of shape on the static structural behavior of cold-formed composite girders for short-span bridges. This paper investigated the behavior of the cold-formed steel composite girders with different shapes in terms of ductility, stiffness, the ultimate failure load, crack resistance, and interfacial slip. Four shapes were carried out in this research: tub, open-box, and double C with and without lips. Six simply supported girder specimens were designed, fabricated, and subjected to static load tests. The results showed that the cold-formed steel double C lipped girder increased the ultimate load by 12.12% compared to the cold-formed steel tub girder. Additionally, the initial stiffness of the cold-formed steel double C girder increased by 21% compared to the cold-formed steel tub girder. The open-box shape specimen can effectively improve the cracking resistance of cold-formed steel composite girders compared to the cold-formed steel tub girders.

https://doi.org/10.28991/CEJ-2026-012-03-021