ABSTRACT
In recent years, breaks of Prestressed Concrete (PC) tendon have been reported. For the maintenance and management of PC structures, it is important to grasp the characteristics of PC structures that have tendon breaks. In this study, with the pre-tensioned PC beam specimens, analytical and experimental approaches are taken. The experimental results show that stress distribution locally changes near the breaking point, whereas the influence on the global behavior is small, when tendons break. If the tendon break occurs in the region where bending stresses are large, crack initiation is induced with reduction of the bending stiffness. Elastic waves resulting from the tendon break tend to propagate throughout the beam and can be captured by monitoring micro vibration of the beam surface. A natural frequency slightly decreased as the number of tendon break increased. In contrast, a damping ratio tends to increase with increasing the number of tendon break.
