Experiment research on seismic performance of prestressed steel reinforced high performance concrete beams

Two prestressed steel reinforced high performance concrete (SRC) beams, a nonprestressed SRC beam and a counterpart prestressed concrete beam were tested under low reversed cyclic loading to evaluate seismic performance of prestressed SRC beams. The failure modes, deformation restoring capacity, ductility and energy dissipation capacity of the prestressed SRC beams were discussed. Results showed that due to the effect of plastic deformations of steel beams encased in concrete, the three SRC beams exhibited residual deformation ratios ranging between 0.64 and 0.79, which were apparently higher than that of the prestressed concrete beam (0.33). The ductility coefficients of the prestressed SRC beams and the prestressed concrete beam ranged between 4.65 and 4.87, obviously lower than that of nonprestressed SRC beam (9.09), which indicated the steel beams influenced the ductility little while prestressing resulted in an apparent reduction in ductility. The amount of energy dissipated by the prestressed SRC beams was less than that dissipated by the nonprestressed SRC beam but much more than that dissipated by the prestressed concrete beam.