Abstract
The purpose of thermally-prestressed continuous composite girder bridges lies in mitigation of transverse cracks in the concrete deck. Instead of using tendons for prestressing, the thermal prestressing method utilizes the deflection of steel girders induced by a temporary heating process without mechanical prestressing. While the transverse cracks can be effectively controlled, decrease in the amount of rebar and the steel girder's section area is also possible. Although the computation method of thermal prestressing effect proposed in previous studies can give accurate results, the computation cost is high and may be difficult for inexperienced engineers. In this study, a simplified method is proposed for computing the thermal prestressing effect, which neglects the heat transfer analysis procedure and utilizes simple 2-D beam element FE models. Comparison of the computation results using existing and simplified methods was performed where the error between the two methods was less then 5%. Therefore, it is concluded that the simplified method can be used with acceptable accuracy for computation of the thermal prestressing effect.