Incremental modeling of relaxation of prestressing wires under variable loading and temperature

Abstract This paper presents a model of prestressing steel relaxation under various levels of loading and temperature. This incremental model enables the delayed strain of prestressing steel wires to be calculated and takes the non-linear coupling of temperature and loading effects into account. It considers different experimental results that could occur in nuclear containment structures, for which a temperature up to 140 °C could be reached for prestressing wires should a loss-of-coolant accident occur. The constitutive law for prestressing steel relaxation is presented, followed by an illustration of the numerical implementation of the proposed model. Finally, the model responses are confronted with experimental results available in the literature supplied by Toumi Ajimi et al. (2017) for the thermo-mechanical conditions between 20 and 140 °C in terms of temperature and 70%–80% of loading ratio.