Bridge decks consisting of precast, prestressed concrete U-beams acting compositely with an in situ concrete top slab are a popular form of construction, sometimes requiring half joints at the ends of the beams. In the past, this has been achieved by using complicated timber formwork attached to the ends of a standard U-beam mould. An alternative method has been proposed which results in a composite half joint, and full-size tests on four such half joints are described in this paper. It is shown that consideration has to be given to behaviour under both service and ultimate loads, and, on the basis of an analysis of the test results, a design procedure is proposed.
B.S. Gill, L.A. Clark and J.P.J. Taylor