ABSTRACT
It is not irrelevant to start this section by quoting Hardy Cross, who exclaimed, when asked about shear in reinforced concrete beams, “Put in stirrups and hang the shear!” The central problem in proportioning reinforced concrete elements to resist combined bending and shear is the determination of how much transverse reinforcement (also called web reinforcement) is required to make certain that the inclined cracks are restrained so that the structural element (be it a column or a beam or a footing) develops its exural strength and toughness. That is the problem we consider in this chapter. We limit our discussion to monotonically increasing load applied within a short time.
