Dual potential capacity model for reinforced concrete short and deep beams subjected to shear

The dual potential capacity model (DPCM) was proposed in this study to evaluate the shear strengths of short and deep reinforced concrete (RC) members with the shear span-to-depth ratios less than 2.5. In the proposed model, the nonlinear flexural analysis considering the bond mechanism between steel reinforcements and surrounding concrete was conducted to estimate the local stress increase in the steel reinforcements between flexural cracks, and the shear demand force of the cracked tension zone in an RC section can also be determined on this basis. The crack concentration factor was introduced to consider the size effect in estimation of the potential shear capacity corresponding to the shear demand force to be resisted by the cracked tension zone. For the compression zone, different plasticity models were adopted depending on the shear span-to-depth ratio to estimate the potential shear capacity of the intact compression zone. For the verification of the proposed model, a total of 466 test results of RC short and deep beams with various shear span-to-depth ratios less than 2.5 were collected from existing literature, and accuracy of the proposed model was verified in detail by comparing the shear strengths of the RC short and deep test specimens estimated from the proposed DPCM with those of the test results.