Shear strength of full-scale steel fibre-reinforced concrete beams without stirrups

Although shear reinforcement in beams typically consists of steel bars bent in the form of stirrups or hoops, the addition of deformed steel fibres to the concrete has been shown to enhance shear resistance and ductility in reinforced concrete beams. This paper presents a model that can be used to predict the shear strength of fibrous concrete rectangular members without stirrups. The model is an extension of the plasticity-based crack sliding model originally developed for plain concrete beams. The crack sliding model has been improved in order to take into account several aspects: the arch effect for deep beams, the postcracking tensile strength of steel fibre reinforced concrete and its ability to control sliding along shear cracks, and the mitigation of the shear size effect due to presence of fibres. The results obtained by the model have been validated by a large set of experimental tests taken from literature, compared with several models proposed in literature, and numerical analyses are carried out showing the influence of fibres on the beam failure mode.