Evaluation of Shear Design Provisions for Reinforced Concrete Beams and Prestressed Concrete Beams

Shear test data have been extracted from previous experimental research and compiled into a database that may be the largest ever made. In this paper, the shear database (SDB) was used for evaluating shear design provisions for both reinforced concrete (RC) beams and prestressd concrete (PSC) beams. A discussion on the use of the results of this evaluation related to calibration and strength reduction factor for the shear design provisions was also provided. It was observed that the shear design provisions did not provide good predictions for RC members and gave very poor predictions especially for RC members without shear reinforcement. On the other hand, the limit on shear strength contributed by transverse reinforcement was observed to be lower than necessary. The shear design provisions gave very unconservative results for the large RC members (d>700mm) without shear reinforcement having light amount of longitudinal reinforcement $(\rho_w