The performance of pretensioned prestressed concrete beams made with lightweight concrete

Abstract

A study on the behaviour of prestressed concrete beams made from clinker aggregate has been carried out at the Faculty of Civil Engineering, UTM. In this paper, the performance of prestressed lightweight concrete beam under two point load is discussed and comparisons are made with normal weight prestressed concrete beam. The clinker is incorporated into the concrete as a direct replacement for both fine and coarse aggregates at 100% replacement level. The use of clinker lightweight concrete was found to save the amount of the total dead load up to 18.8%. The test results show that lightweight concrete using clinker exhibit an almost similar pattern in cracking behaviour and failure modes. The test results show that the prestressed lightweight concrete beams can resist loading up to 90% of the normal prestressed concrete beams. The study also shows that clinker lightweight concrete exhibit good performance and is suitable to be used in prestressed concrete beam