A Novel Concept of Pretensioning Prestressed Concrete Pavements

Prestressing concrete in buildings and bridges is an established and continuously expanding practice. It is only natural to extend prestressing to runways and highways to overcome the ever present problem of the cracking of conventional concrete pavement. The superiority of a prestressed over a conventional reinforced concrete pavement is obvious: savings in quantity of concrete (the thickness of a prestressed pavement is but a fraction of that of a conventional concrete pavement), resilience of a prestressed pavement and, hence, less stringent requirements for the preparation of subgrade; and, finally, the most important characteristic of prestressed pavement is the absence of shrinkage and thermal cracks and, therefore, negligible maintenance during the service life of the pavement. As prestressed concrete bridges became a nationwide practice within the span of a few years from scattered pioneering attempts, so it would not be surprising to witness a nationwide network of prestressed highways within the foreseeable future. In prestressed concrete, as commonly employed in buildings and bridges, we usually regard the structural behavior under service loads