An Experiment of Flexural Behavior for the Prestressed Concrete Beams with Partially Bonded External Tendons

Abstract

Recently, the external prestressed concrete structures are increasingly being built. The mechanical behavior of prestressed concrete beams with external tendon is different from that of normal bonded PSC beams in that the increment of tendon stress was derived by whole member behavior. By this reason, the ultimate stress of external tendon is smaller than that of bonded tendon or internal unbonded tendon. The purposes of the present paper are therefore to improve the mechanical behavior of external unbonded tendon by using partially bonded external tendon and to evaluate the flexural behavior of partially bonded external tendon by the flexural member experiment. From the experimental results, before flexural cracking, there was no difference between external unbonded, partially bonded and bonded tendons. However, after cracking, yielding load of reinforcement, ultimate load, and tendon stress were increased in the sequence of external unbonded, partially bonded and bonded tendon members. The equation of ACI-318 and AASHTO 1994 were not matched with test results and had no correlations. So the newly proposed equation will be needed including the consideration of tendon profile, tendon bonded type, and so on. The proposed partially bonded external tendon in this paper will be a effective basis for the evaluation of external tendons in construction and design.