On the Shear Strength of Reinforced Concrete Walls

A database consisting of 414 reinforced concrete (RC) walls with rectangular, barbell, and flanged cross sections reported to have failed in shear was assembled. Based on the database, a number of design- and code-based sets of equations were evaluated regarding their capacity to predict the peak shear strength of walls. It is demonstrated that the design provisions studied vary considerably in functional form and have in general poor predictive capacity for walls with reinforcement detailing not in accordance with modern code requirements. New, improved empirical equations are proposed which result in better predictions with relatively smaller scatter and variation compared to test values and have no restrictions in their application; therefore, they are particularly suitable for the assessment of shear resistance of existing RC walls designed with older code principles.