Structural behavior of reinforced concrete pre-stressed tapered beams

This research is focused on studying the flexural behavior of reinforced concrete prestressed (post-tensioned) tapered beams. The present study investigates the impact of compressive strength, prestressed reinforcement, and tapering ratio on flexural behavior. All tested beams have a total length equal to (2600mm) and a clear distance between supports equal to (2400mm), the width of the beam (250mm), and maintain the same amount of concrete volume. The experimental results showed that when a prestressed reinforcement changes from (one strand) for (two strands), this change will affect the prismatic beam, in which the first cracking and the ultimate load will be raised by (60% and 31.71%), respectively, and for a non-prismatic beam with tapering ratios of (1.5 and 2), the first cracking will increase by (12.5% and 2.63%) also the maximum load raised by (28.3% and 31.03%). The failure mode was flexural for all tested beams with crushing in the compression zone. This paper simulated a numerical analysis of experimentally tested specimens using a nonlinear finite element technique (ABAQUS/CAE 2021 software). The numerical outcomes revealed a good correlation compared with the results of the experimental study.