Shear-flexural strength mechanical model for the design and assessment of reinforced concrete beams subjected to point or distributed loads

A mechanical model recently developed for the shear strength of slender reinforced concrete beams with and without shear reinforcement is presented and extended to elements with uniformly distributed loads, specially focusing on practical design and assessment in this paper. The shear strength is considered to be the sum of the shear transferred by the concrete compression chord, along the crack, due to residual tensile and frictional stresses, by the stirrups and, if they exist, by the longitudinal reinforcement. Based on the principles of structural mechanics simple expressions have been derived separately for each shear transfer action and for their interaction at ultimate limit state. The predictions of the model have been compared to those obtained by using the EC2, MC2010 and ACI 318-08 provisions and they fit very well the available experimental results from the recently published ACI-DAfStb databases of shear tests on slender reinforced concrete beams with and without stirrups. Finally, a detailed application example has been presented, obtaining each contributing component to the shear strength and the assumed shape and position of the critical crack.