Overload Behavior of an Experimental Precast Prestressed Concrete Segmental Bridge

n recent years, interest in segmental bridges has grown and their behavior under applied loads has received much attention. The Pennsylvania Department of Transportation, with the support of the Federal Highway Administration, responded to this growing interest by sponsoring the construction of an experimental segmental bridge as a part of the 1 mile (1.6 km) oval shaped test track which is operated by the Pennsylvania Transportation Institute at The Pennsylvania State University. One of the objectives of this research was to study the overload behavior in order to establish actual safety factors. This required loading the bridge to failure in addition to conducting theoretical studies. An analytic procedure based on the finite element method was developed to predict the complete loaddeformation response of the prestressed segmental bridge. The girder was also analyzed using the standard theoretical analysis for prestressed concrete structures, which is a simpler method. The theoretical results obtained by those two methods were then compared with the experimental results from the failure tests.