Evaluation of an experimental CFRP pre-stressed beam and slab road bridge

The paper reports the evaluation of the first application of CFRP pre-stressed girders for a road bridge in Belgium. In this experiment, one girder in each approach span of a three span beam and slab road bridge is pre-tensioned by carbon fibre polymer wires and designed to have equivalent strength as the other conventionally pre-tensioned girders. The assessment is done through strain gauge measurements during girder fabrication and during a bridge-loading test. The experiment has detected difficulties concerning the effectiveness of pre-tensioning, mostly due to the anchoring, although the eventual performance of the CFRP pre-stressed girders is found to be satisfactory.