Behavior of Prestressed Composite Steel Plate Girders in Long Span Applications

The current research highlights the importance of the use of prestressed composite steel girders due to its numerous applications, particularly in long spans where prestressed concrete is inefficient. However, it is not widely used in the fields and researchers lately focus on prestressed steel beams only. Therefore, this paper investigates the advantages of a composite section of steel and concrete prestressed with tendons. The study includes the efficacy of pre-stressed steel in minimizing the weight of structural steel, raising its maximum capacity by focusing on several parameters. These parameters include the shape of the cables, the locations of tendons placement, the shape of bracing and its locations, and the change in the values of the prestressing force, deflection, and strain. Then, these factors are applied in two loading cases: tensioning and after tensioning. In addition, the effect of modifying the span of a plate girder was investigated. When assessing the data gathered at the top of the slab in the first loading instance, the results show that. The deflection at the top slab of the composite plate girder grows with the length of the plate girder's span because under the same pre-stressing force loading, the deflection for the composite plate girder with span 40 m is approximately 48% larger than the deflection occurred for plate girder with span 30 m at first load case.