Shear Strength Prediction of Reinforced Concrete Two-way Thick Slabs: Comparison between Experimental and Analytical Studies

Abstract

This paper describes an attempt to perform analytical studies on shear strength prediction of reinforced concrete two-way thick slabs. To this end, twenty test data from four groups of researchers were adopted and compared against the shear strength predictions from five shear design equations (i.e., ACI 318-14, ACI 318-19, EC2, CSA, and SMCFT). The ability of these equations to provide accurate prediction was evaluated based on the ratio of test-to-calculated shear strength, coefficient of variation (COV), and distribution of test data against the equality line. From the results presented, it was shown that each shear design prediction varied considerably from one another. Regarding the accuracy, it was shown that the SMCFT design method was able to predict the shear strength more accurately and proved the development of theoretically-sound shear design with a simple and straightforward procedure worked well in this case. It was also shown that improved prediction was able to be captured by ACI 318-19 compared to its preceding version of ACI 318-14. ACI 318-19 was also shown to demonstrate more conservative predictions which were more comparable to SMCFT.