ABSTRACT
In current engineering practice, headed anchors are used to transfer load into rein forced concrete members. Experience, a large number of experiments and numerical studies confirm that fastenings are capable to introduce the force into the reinforced concrete member without using a reinforcement. As shown by Eligehausen and Sawade (1989) and Eligehausen and Ozbolt (1991), the main reason for this is a stable crack propagation up to peak load, what is a consequence of a three-dimensional stress-strain state in the load transfer zone. However, since no reinforcement is pre sent, the fracture process zone is relatively small and failure is rather brittle i.e. very close to a linear elastic fracture mechanics type of failure. Therefore, it is im-
portant to clearly understand the failure mechanism and the influence of different geometrical and material parameters on the load capacity. This is of course not simple because in the practice many types of fastenings exist as well as a number of different geometrical situations.
