Stiffness of reinforced concrete beams with external tendons

In recent years, external prestressing has become a primary method for strengthening existing concrete structures and has been increasingly used in the construction of newly erected ones, particularly segmental bridges. Analysis of externally prestressed members is more difficult than that of members with internal bonded tendons. This is because external tendons are unbonded to the concrete and the stress in such tendons depends on the deformations of the whole member and is assumed uniform at all sections. In this paper, a simple analytical model is outlined for predicting the flexural behavior of reinforced concrete members with external tendons under service loads. The analysis accounts for various factors that affect the flexural behavior including eccentricity variations of external tendons and span-to-depth ratios. Good agreement has been found between the predicted results and those in the literature.