Shear Behavior of Reinforced Concrete Beams without Transverse Reinforcement Based on Critical Shear Displacement

This paper presents a new concept to evaluate the shear capacity of reinforced concrete beams without shear reinforcement having flexural shear failure. Based on experimental observations, it is proposed that the opening of the critical inclined crack can be considered as the lower bound for the shear capacity of a structural member. It is also proposed that the unstable opening of the critical inclined crack is triggered when the shear displacement in an existing flexural crack reaches a critical value Δ_cr. Thus the critical shear displacement is used as a failure criterion, and based on that a new shear evaluation method is proposed. The method shows agreeable accuracy when compared with test results in literature.