The shear strength of rectangular reinforced and prestressed concrete beams

This paper describes a method of calculating the shear strength of reinforced and prestressed concrete rectangular beams under one or two point loads. A new failure criterion for the concrete of the compression zone has been developed with the help of the ‘distortion energy’ principle. A comparison with other criteria shows that this hypothesis describes the failure pattern of concrete with reasonable safety. The inclination of shear cracks has been introduced as an independent variable in this method. The expressions developed cover bending failure as a special case. The calculated results show good agreement with experimental evidence.