A stress field approach for the shear capacity of RC beams with stirrups

This paper presents a stress field approach for the shear capacity of stirrup-reinforced concrete beams that explicitly incorporates the contribution of principal tensile stresses in concrete. This formulation represents an extension of the variable strut inclination method adopted in the Eurocode 2. In this model, the stress fields in web concrete consist of principal compressive stresses inclined at an angle combined with principal tensile stresses oriented along a direction orthogonal to the former (the latter being typically neglected in other formulations). Three different failure mechanisms are identified, from which the strut inclination angle and the corresponding shear strength are determined through equilibrium principles and the static theorem of limit analysis, similar to the EC-2 approach. It is demonstrated that incorporating the contribution of principal tensile stresses of concrete slightly increases the ultimate inclination angle of the compression struts as well as the shear capacity of reinforced concrete beams. The proposed stress field approach improves the prediction of the shear strength in comparison with the Eurocode 2 model, in terms of both accuracy (mean) and precision (CoV), as demonstrated by a broad comparison with more than 200 published experimental results from the literature.