A Review of Behavior of Reinforced Concrete Deep Beams

Abstract

Reinforced concrete deep beams are structural members having depth much greater than normal in relation to their span, while the thickness in the perpendicular direction is much smaller than either span or depth. The strength of deep beams is usually controlled by shear, rather than flexure. In this study, the previous researches related to reinforced concrete deep beams will be reviewed. These researches approximately started in the second half of the past century. Large numbers of researchers studied the behavior of concrete deep beams and the determination of their capacity. Some of these researches are experimental investigations carried out by testing a number of deep beams with variation in some parameters, while the others are theoretical to estimate deep beam capacity by developing some theories and suggestion of equations for calculating its capacity and comparisons were made with those adopted by some codes. Because of the large number of these researches, their review requires large part of this study, and because the prior studies elaborately reviewed the pioneer researches, only the researches made since year 2000 will be reviewed in this study.