Bridges

The root cause of several worldwide bridge collapses in the past 20 years has been identified as resulting from the poor performance of structural details known as halving joints. Concrete halving joints are renowned for their low redundancy, potentially brittle failure characteristic (if not detailed correctly), and high stress concentration zones. Following the traditional Strut & Tie Model capacity estimate limitation related to the pre-tensioned halving joint girders, a research program has been initiated to investigate and better understand the effect of strand development length and the load slip relation on the girder capacity.

This paper presents the results of the investigation and drawing relationship between strand development as well as strand load slip generally, and on the halving joint girder performance. Some of these results may have application to other scenarios where strand development influences member (shear) capacity (not discussed in full in this paper).