International Concrete Abstracts Portal

The development of external prestressing has been one of the major trends in construction during the last 10 years, along with the development of concrete cable-stayed bridges and the increasing use of high-strength concrete. After a historical review, the main principles of the design of externally prestressed bridges are presented. The paper then details the influence of the construction method on the external tendon organization: bridges built span by span, bridges built by the cantilever method or by methods which are mechanically equivalent, and bridges built by the incremental launching method. Some practical problems are presented, such as handling heavy jacks. A last chapter is devoted to composite structures, with concrete top and bottom slabs and steel webs, prestressed by external tendons. French experimental constructions of this type do not appear economically interesting, and prestressing classical composite structures is not yet considered as good a solution for the same reason. But external prestressing is now widely developed for concrete bridges in the United States, France and, more recently, in Belgium, Switzerland, Venezuela, Germany, and Czechoslovakia.

In the last decade, the use of external tendons for prestressing of concrete structures has been developed considerably for a variety of applications. This paper deals with the technical problems related to the use of external prestressing to emphasize the development and investigation of critical questions. The following aspects are discussed: behavior of concrete structures at he serviceability and ultimate limit states; the required minimum area of conventional (nonprestressed) reinforcement; general protection of the tendons; corrosion protection of the prestressing steel; design of the saddles--deviation zones--and the effect of tendon curvature on their strength and transfer of the prestress forces to the structure; and anchorage of the tendons and the zone of transfer of the prestressing force into the structure.

After 10 or so years of research and practical application, the external prestressing of concrete is now becoming a normal procedure, soon to be codified in some countries. Among the technical solutions applied to a large number of works, in the U.S.A. and France particularly, some emerge as being the best examples both from the point of view of performance and economy. This is the case where normal strands in HDPE ducts are used with an injected grout. This technique can be used equally well with removable external prestressing and with external prestressing that is partially bonded. In difficult cases, such as very long structures (bridges with lengths exceeding 200 m or 600 ft) or structures with high curvature (tanks and various vessels) or where it is difficult to bring large jacks up to the anchorages, an external cable, formed of projected strands, gathered together in the same HDPE duct and isolated from one another, is a very effective and elegant solution with an unequalled degree of protection and with the opportunity to check the prestressing force throughout the entire life of the structure.

The concept of precast segmental construction with external tendons has been developed extensively since 1978, starting with the construction of the Long Key Bridge (Florida). Since this first experience, many other structures (more than 5,500,000 ftý of deck) have been designed and successfully built using the same method. The performance of all bridges now in operation has been excellent. However, some questions were raised in the minds of engineers, unfamiliar with the method, regarding the behavior of structures prestressed with external tendons beyond the range of design loads (serviceability limit state). Because continuous reinforcement is not usually provided across the match cast joints between segments, concern was expressed that adequate ultimate behavior and sufficient strength could not be obtained. To provide a satisfactory answer to these legitimate questions, a special computer program (DEFLECT) has been developed to analyze accurately the response of the structures prestressed by external tendons. Moreover, several tests are available to confirm the behavior of such structures while verifying the validity of the DEFLECT computer program. This design tool has been used to predict the structural behavior of simply supported and continuous structures beyond joint opening, up to ultimate capacity of the girders with and without thermal loads. Several different prestressing methods have been analyzed with different bonding conditions at the point of deviation of the external tendons. It was found systematically that structures prestressed with either internal or external tendons behave essentially the same way at all loading stages up to ultimate.

A laboratory investigation was performed to study deviation saddles, a type of tendon deviator used in externally post-tensioned precast segmental box girder bridges. Ten reduced-scale models of deviation saddles were fabricated and loaded to ultimate using a specially designed testing apparatus that applied load to each deviator just as would be applied to a deviator in a bridge. The objectives of the study were to: experimentally investigate the strength and ductility of deviators; evaluate deviator details in light of observed performance; define behavioral models for deviators; determine the effects of using epoxy-coated reinforcement; and establish design criteria. Data from the test series are presented, two analysis techniques are formulated, and design recommendations are made for design of tendon deviators.