A comparative study in flexure and shear design of spread footings

Abstract

The design of spread footings is a field widely explored in structural engineering being the flexure and shear design verified by the use of codes. The objective of this paper consists in a comparative study of spread footing design between the Brazilian’s code, Eurocode and American’s code. The methodology considered an analytical analysis with three different examples in the flexure and shear design of the spread footings with different loads and footing height. The results show that the American’s code presented the minimum required value of reinforcement rates ​​in all examples and also was the only code that verified the punching and shear effect for all studied cases. In Eurocode flexure design, the results show that in the most examples, the reinforcement rate is higher than that considered by the other codes. The Brazilian code presented an inconsistency in the verification of the punching effect for one of the studied examples, requiring, therefore, a review and a modification of the code.