ABSTRACT
ABSTRACT: The shear provisions of the Canadian CSA code, the US ACI code and EC2 for members without shear reinforcement are compared to a database of 1601 experimentally observed shear failures.The conclusion is that the CSA shear provisions provide the best estimate of the observed shear strength, though some improvement could be made for strut-and-tie with high strength concrete. The ACI code, which has remained essentially unchanged for 40 years provides unconservative predictions both for some members controlled by the strut-andtie provisions and for large members controlled by sectional shear failures primarily in the latter case due to the size effect being ignored. EC2 also provide poor matches to the observed results with the size effect being underestimated, and the influence of high reinforcement percentages being overestimated.
