Shear strength prediction for steel reinforced concrete deep beams

This study proposes an analytical method for determining the shear strengths of steel reinforced concrete deep beams under the failure mode of concrete crushing originally based on the softened strut-and-tie model. The proposed method is a good physical model that can correlate well with the observed failure phenomenon of steel reinforced concrete deep beams. By comparing the predictions of the proposed method with the available test results from the literature, it was found that the proposed method is capable of predicting the shear strengths for steel reinforced concrete deep beams with sufficient accuracy. The shear-carrying behavior of steel reinforced concrete deep beams is highly influenced by the ratios of flange width to gross width, the shear span-to-depth ratios, and the concrete strengths. When the ratio of flange width to gross width is low, the shear-carrying capacities of steel reinforced concrete deep beams increase with the increasing ratio. However, if the ratio of the flange width to gross width is higher than a critical value, then the failure mode of steel reinforced concrete deep beams will be converted from diagonal compression failure into bearing failure.