Effects of Prestress Level and Bond on the Behavior of Prestressed Concrete Pavements

339 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1983.Prestressing has long been recognized as a viable method of increasing the flexural capacity of concrete. The early application of prestressed concrete pavements was in the mid 1940's but its progress was slow compared with the other types of rigid pavements. Performance of the early build prestressed concrete pavements and advancements in construction technology as well as the ever increasing traffic loads have renewed interest in this type of construction.There is a wide range in the prestress level used for prestressed concrete pavements. Also, the prestressing tendons are either bonded or unbonded to the concrete. The recent trend in the design of concrete pavements prestressed in both directions (usually with airport pavements) is to make the transverse level approximately one half of that in the longitudinal direction.The aim of this study is to investigate, theoretically and experimentally, the effects of prestress level and the bond between tendons and concrete on the behavior of prestressed concrete pavements. This was achieved using two sources of information. The first was from the literature review on the behavior of uncracked pavement slabs loaded to failure. The second source of information was from the data obtained from testing uniformly supported model slabs both with and without joints.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD