Shear Design of Concrete Members without Shear Reinforcement—A Solved Problem?

The design of concrete members for shear without stirrups has become a major issue worldwide especially for bridge decks as the shear capacity according to the ‘new’ regulations like the Eurocode often gives significant smaller values than the one predicted by former codes. Therefore nowadays stirrups are required in bridge decks. In addition the safety of existing structures mainly build without shear reinforcement has been brought into focus. The lack of the available design models will be demonstrated by comparing the results of various codes. The inaccuracy of the EC2 approach is checked by means of a shear database. Experimental as well as numerical studies revealed that the shear capacity of haunched beams is different from members with constant height. It is questionable whether this behavior is caused by the vertical component of the inclined compression chord Vcc.