Cable layout design of prestressed conerete beams using neural networks

摘要

The cable layout design is the most important step in the design of prestressed concrete structures. Most often cables are idealized as parabola in different spans. Although this simplifies the analysis, there are two major problems with this approach. First, it creates discontinuity at intermediate supports and secondly it is computationally expensive. To overcome these shortcomings, in this study, prestressing cables have been modeled by B-spIine curve. Using the convex hull property of the B-spiine, an efficient algorithm has been developed to obtain the cable layout. In the finite element analysis, nine node plane stress and three node curved bar elements are used to model concrete and cable respectively. Further, to cut short the design time, neural networks have been used for cable layout design. Several continuous span beams with varying loading conditions are successfully designed using proposed approach.