Fatigue Response of Pretensioned Concrete Beams

The objective of this thesis is to discuss the suitability of using a extreme fiber concrete tensile stress of '12cf calculated using uncracked section analysis as a limit state criterion for evaluating prestressed concrete highway bridges as a part of required serviceability inspections. This thesis reviews strand fatigue test results as well as fatigue test results of prestressed beams from past experiments. Test results of four new prestressed beam fatigue tests are reported and analyzed. Finally, a recommendation is made that beam fatigue analysis should be based on the stress range of the prestressing strands, unless the calculated extreme fiber concrete tensile stress is limited to less than '3cf based on uncracked section analysis.