Unlike in conventional bridges, the backfill and the roadway pavement have a major bearing on the load capacity of buried corrugated metal structures. In the soil-steel structure model one can distinguish two structural subsystems: the shell made of corrugated steel plates and the soil backfill with the road pavement. The interaction between them is modelled as a contact (interfacial) interaction, i.e. forces normal and tangent to the surface of the shell. The normal interactions are variable during both construction and service life. Two algorithms are presented. In the first algorithm on the basis of unit strains the internal forces in the shell are determined and consequently the contact interactions are calculated. A large number of measuring points distributed on the circumferential section of the shell is needed for the calculations. In the second algorithm the collocation condition, according to which the result obtained from the shell geometry model must agree with the measured displacement of the structure’s collocation point, is used. When there are more such points, the estimated result is more precise. The advantage of both algorithms is that they take into account the physical characteristics of the soil in the backfill layers, but above all the backfill laying and compacting technology. The results of such analyses can be the basis for comparing the effectiveness of conventional geotechnical models.

This article presents theoretical and experimental calculations of the minimum thickness of a compensation lip used in external gear pumps. Pumps of this type are innovative technical solutions in which circumferential backlash (clearance) compensation is used to improve their volumetric and overall efficiency. However, constructing a prototype of such a pump requires long-lasting research, and the compensation lip is its key object, due to the fact that it is an element influenced by a notch and that it operates in unfavorable conditions of strong fatigue stresses. The theoretical calculations presented in this article are based on identifying maximum stress values in a fatigue cycle and on implementing the stress failure condition and the conditions related to the required value of the fatigue safety factor. The experimental research focuses on static bending tests of the lips as well as on the fatigue loading of the lips in series of tests at increasing stress values until lip failure due to fatigue. The tests allowed the minimum lip thickness to be found for the assumed number of fatigue cycles, which is 2.5 times the number of cycles used in wear margin tests.