Course Details

Prestressed Concrete

Academic Year 2025/26

BLA010 course is part of 1 study plan

​ BPC-SI / K Winter Semester 4th year

Course Guarantor

doc. Ing. Miloš Zich, Ph.D.

Institute

Institute of Concrete and Masonry Structures

Language of instruction

Czech

Credits

5 credits

Semester

winter

Forms and criteria of assessment

course-unit credit and examination

Offered to foreign students

Not to offer

Course on BUT site

https://www.vut.cz/en/students/courses/detail/289801

Lecture

13 weeks, 2 hours/week, elective

Syllabus

  • 1. Basic concept of prestressing. Behaviour of non-prestressed and prestressed concrete beams. Material properties of concrete.
  • 2. Prestressing tendons and bars. Prestressing technology, basic terminology. Pretensioned concrete.
  • 3. Post-tensioning operations, technology, prestressing systems.
  • 4.–5. Losses of prestressing of pretensioned and post-tensioned concrete. Construction and serviceability stages.
  • 6. Effects of prestressing. Equivalent load method. Concordant tendon, transformation of tendon.
  • 7. Design of prestressing - load balanced method. Allowable stresses. Crack resistance.
  • 8. Structural analysis of step-by-step built structures, non-homogeneity of structures. Creep analysis.
  • 9. Ultimate limit state of prestressed members loaded by axial force and bending moment, decompression state, initial state of stress.
  • 10. Prestressed members loaded in shear and torsion, stress analysis, proportioning.
  • 11. Anchorage zone analysis, calculation model, check of resistance, proportioning.
  • 12. Serviceability limit states (SLS). Crack resistance, tensile stresses in the concrete after cracking.
  • 13. Control of crack width of prestressed members. Control of deflection.

Exercise

13 weeks, 2 hours/week, compulsory

Syllabus

  • 1. Post-tensioned bridge beam – design: Load, design of a cross section, material characteristics, types of anchors, structural principles, design of prestressing force and its eccentricity.
  • 2. Verification of prestressing force design via loads effects compensation method, design of cables and their trajectory.
  • 3. Effects of prestressing on the structures – examples.
  • 4. Post-tensioned bridge beam – design (continuation): Effects of load, initial (anchoring) stress, immediate changes of prestressing.
  • 5. Simplified calculation of time-dependent changes of prestressing. Time behaviour of prestressing force magnitude.
  • 6. Correction.
  • 7. Serviceability limit states – limit state of stress and cracks limitation (decompression).
  • 8. Ultimate limit state – bending moment.
  • 9. Ultimate limit state – shear, design of shearing reinforcement.
  • 10. Verification of anchors, design of reinforcement in the anchoring area, drawing of active and passive reinforcement.
  • 11. Serviceability limit states – deflection of a beam. Correction.
  • 12. Effects of prestressing on the structures (continution): Effect of prestressing on the structures progressively erected – examples.
  • 13. Design submission. Credit.