Long-Term Behaviour of Precast Concrete Deck Using Longitudinal Prestressed Tendons in Composite I-Girder Bridges

Twin-I girder bridge systems composite with precast concrete deck have advantages including construction simplification and improved concrete strength compared with traditional multi-I girder bridge systems with cast-in-place concrete deck. But the cracking is still a big issue at interior support for continuous span bridges using twin-I girders. To reduce cracks occurrence in the hogging regions subject to negative moments and to guarantee the durability of bridges, the most essential way is to reduce the tensile stress of concrete deck within the hogging regions. In this paper, the prestressed tendons are arranged to prestress the precast concrete deck before it is connected with the steel girders. In this way, the initial compressive stress induced by the prestressed tendons in the concrete deck within the hogging region is much higher than that in regular concrete deck without prestressed tendons. A finite element analysis is developed to study the long-term behaviour of prestressed concrete deck for a twin-I girder bridge. The results show that the prestressed tendons induce large compressive stresses in the concrete deck but the compressive stresses are reduced due to concrete creep. The final compressive stresses in the concrete deck are about half of the initial compressive stresses. Additionally, parametric study is conducted to find the effect to the long-term behaviour of concrete deck including girder depth, deck size, prestressing stress and additional imposed load. The results show that the prestressing compressive stress in precast concrete deck is transferred to steel girders due to concrete creep. The prestressed forces transfer between the concrete deck and steel girder cause the loss of compressive stresses in precast concrete deck. The prestressed tendons can introduce some compressive stress in the concrete deck to overcome the tensile stress induced by the live load but the force transfer due to concrete creep needs be considered. The concrete creep makes the compressive stress loss and the force redistribution in the hogging regions, which should be considered in the design the twin-I girder bridge composite with prestressed precast concrete deck.