ELU de Cortante en Vigas: Aproximación Histórica y Verificación Experimental del Tratamiento de la EHE

ULS of shear in beams: historical approach and experimental verification of the EHE procedure

The release of the Spanish Concrete Code EHE has brought up again the debate about the shear design provisions for reinforced concrete members. Different aspects, as the shear strength of beams without web reinforcement, the minimum amount of shear reinforcement, the size effect, and the concrete virtual contribution Vc in the shear strength are studied. This paper tries to clarify the mechanism of shear strength transfer for concrete beams, by historically introducing different approaches for shear design. The paper remarks the most recent proposes, as the modified compression field theory (MCFT), a simple model providing good accuracy over a wide range of conditions that considers the main factors affecting the shear response of a concrete beam. Finally, a statistical analysis has been carried out to compare test results with the EHE shear design provisions, and results predicted by other codes and the MCFT. It is concluded that for beams without shear reinforcement the EHE provides a very good correlation with the empirical tests. However, for beams with stirrups the predictions are conservative and present a very high coefficient of variation.