• Journal of the Korea Concrete Institute
• /
• v.21 no.4
• /
• pp.513-521
• /
• 2009

Recently, the externally prestressed unbonded concrete structures are increasingly being built. The mechanical behavior of prestressed concrete beams with external unbonded tendon is different from that of normal bonded PSC beams in that the slip of tendons at deviators and the change of tendon eccentricity occurs as external loads are applied in external unbonded PSC beams. The purpose of the present paper is therefore to evaluate the flexural behavior by performing static flexural test according to tendon area and tendon force. From experimental results, before flexural cracking, there was no difference between external members and bonded members. However, after cracking, yielding load of reinforcement, ultimate load, and the tendon stress of external members was lower than that of bonded members. For the relationship of load-tendon stress, the increasing of tendon strain was inversely proportional to the initial tendon force. However, even if the initial tendon force was large, the tendon strain with small effective stress was smaller than that with large effective stress. The concrete compressive strain was proportional to the effective stress of external tendon. From the comparison between test results and codes, the ACI-318 could not consider the effect of tendon force or effective stress, and especially the results of ACI-318 were very small, so it was very conservative. And the AASHTO 1994 could be influenced on the tendon area, initial force and effective stress, but as it was made on the basis of internal unbonded tendon, its results were much larger than the test results. For this reason, the new correct predict equation of external tendon stress will be needed.