Identification of prestress-loss in PSC beams using modal information

One of the uncertain damage parameters to jeopardize the safety of existing PSC bridges is the loss of the prestress force. A substantial prestress-loss can lead to severe problems in the serviceability and safety of the PSC bridges. In this paper, a nondestructive method to detect prestress-loss in beam-type PSC bridges using a few natural frequencies is presented. An analytical model is formulated to estimate changes in natural frequencies of the PSC bridges under various prestress forces. Also, an inverse-solution algorithm is proposed to detect the prestress-loss by measuring the changes in natural frequencies. The feasibility of the proposed approach is evaluated using PSC beams for which a few natural frequencies were experimentally measured for a set of prestress-loss cases. Numerical models of two-span continuous PSC beams are also examined to verify that the proposed algorithm works on more complicated cases.