According to the characteristic of preloaded reinforced concrete beams strengthened by pretensioned carbon fiber composite sheets,a suitable finite element model and corresponding calculation steps were proposed.The method was verified by the testing results of two groups of strengthened beam specimens.Comparison between simulation and testing results shows that the proposed method is a precise numerical tool.Further parameter analysis using the proposed method shows that the bearing capacity of a strengthened beam might be notably reduced if the preload applied on the beam is larger than 40% of the initial bearing capacity of the beam,the strength of carbon fiber composite sheets can be fully used by using pretensioning technique,and the negative influence of the preload on the bending behavior of a strengthened beam can be made up when the prestrain of carbon fiber composite sheets is between 0.003~0.004.