CHART DEVELOPMENT FOR THE ESTIMATION OF DEFLECTION IN PRE-STRESSED RAILWAY GIRDER

Abstract

In designing pre-stressed girder, calculating deflection
is the necessary and rigorous step which one has
to calculate at the end of the design process and tell
whether the design girder is serviceable or not. If it is
not, the designer has to change the cross-sectional
dimension and repeat the step once again. But if the
designer can certainly know the deflection of that
structure in advance of those steps, he/she can eliminate
such iteration. This research is intended to develop
a program that plot a deflection chart for simply
supported pre-stressed railway girder. To achieve
the objective of the research, a simple user friendly
and versatile program is developed that plots a deflection
chart for simply supported pre-stressed railway
girder. With the help of the findings and using
the program one can control the deflection or camber
of the pre-stressed member with the magnitude of the
applied load and varying the eccentricity of the tendon
profile both at the support and at the mid-span.
And for a given cross-sectional geometry of a bridge,
a pre-stressed member has not only a maximum,, but
also a minimum span length limit in order to serve
the intended function without failure.