Influence Factors for the Shear Strength of Exterior and Interior Reinforced Concrete Beam-column Joints

This paper investigates the key influence factors for the shear strength of both exterior and interior reinforced concrete (RC) beam-column joints. A database of totally 172 experimental RC beam-column connections constructed using the published literature was used in the analysis. Based on the database, the correlation coefficient (CC) between the considered parameters and the tested joint shear strength was computed, and the important level of these parameters was quantified. Results of the analysis showed that five key parameters for the joint shear strength included (1) the concrete compressive strength, (2) the vertical joint shear reinforcement, (3) the beam bars detail index, (4) the horizontal joint shear reinforcement and (5) the column axial stress. Among the influence factors, the concrete compressive strength had the most significant correlation to the joint shear strength and interestingly its correlation was higher for the interior connections with CC = 0.8 compared to CC = 0.69 for the exterior connections. For the remaining factors, the analysis conversely showed that their correlations to the joint shear strength of exterior joint were stronger than that of the interior joint.