Sources of End Zone Cracking of Pretensioned Concrete Girders
From the proceedings of the 2008 Concrete Bridge Conference, St. Louis, Missouri, May 2-4, 2008.
Abstract
Recent developments of high performance concrete, increasing amounts of prestressing, and increasing use of deep girders have resulted in increasing popularity of precast pretensioned concrete girders in bridge construction. These developments have increasingly contributed to end zone cracking. This paper summarizes the interim results of an ongoing research sponsored by the National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP) Project 18-14. The objectives of the research are: (1) to establish procedures for the acceptance, repair, or rejection of precast/prestressed concrete girders with longitudinal web cracking, and (2) to prepare a user's manual for the application of these procedures. The results from a national survey of fabricators and users of pretensioned concrete girders and an extensive literature review are presented in this paper.