Flexural strength of prestressed concrete beams — A graphical solution

Abstract

A simple graphical solution is presented for the determination of the reinforcement stress in the beam at failure to evaluate the flexural strength of prestressed concrete beams with non-rectangular compressed concrete section consisting of linear segments with or without supplementary non-prestressed reinforcement. This is an extension of the approach presented bu Warwaruk for the case of rectangular beams without non-prestressed reinforcement [1]. It is general in scope; values of reinforcement stress at failure can be obtained for various conditions. This method can be adopted for design purposes.