Monitoring of tensile force of PSC girder by measuring iron loss variation using EM sensors

Abstract

The actual tensile force of pre-stressed (PS) tendons of a prestressed concrete (PSC) girder is one of the important factors for evaluating the performance of PSC girder bridges. To measure the tensile force of the PS tendon, this study proposed an iron loss variation based tensile force estimation method using embedded EM sensors. The iron loss of PS tendons are changed according to the applied tensile force. To measure the iron loss of PS tendon of PSC girder, the EM sensor should be embedded in the PSC girder because the PS tendons were located in inside of PSC girder. To verify the proposed method, the experimental tests were performed. The EM sensors were embedded into PSC girder specimen and the iron loss changes due to the variations of tensile forces were measured using EM sensors. According to the measurement results, the proposed method can be a one of the solution to monitor the tensile force of PS tendons.