Effect of prestress force on longitudinal vibration of bonded tendons embedded in a nuclear containment

In this paper, evaluation of tensile force on bonded seven-wire strand embedded in nuclear reactor containments has been nondestructively investigated. For this purpose, a total of eight prestressed concrete beam specimens with different tension force levels have been fabricated and tested in terms of using an impact pulse at one end of the strand. Subsequently, various longitudinal vibration characteristics excited by the pulse have been analyzed in detailed. In short, the present study has demonstrated that longitudinal frequency, elastic wave velocity, and elastic modulus are nonlinearly increased as the tensile force level is increased. It is thus postulated that the longitudinal vibration characteristics of the existing bonded tendons can be of promising indicators for the inspection of a tensile force loss.