ARCH ACTION IN REINFORCED CONCRETE BEAMS--A RATIONAL PREDICTION OF SHEAR STRENGTH. DISCUSSION AND CLOSURE

A discussion of a paper with the aforementioned title by D. Kim, W. Kim, and R.N. White, published in this journal (Volume 96, Number 4, July-August 1999), is presented. The discusser presents a summary of his own approach for shear strength predictions and raises a number of questions and issues on this problem. The discusser's results indicate that correlation between his predictions and experimental results began to break down for reinforcing ratios higher than approximately 2%. The discusser also found some dependence of shear strength on compression reinforcing ratio, with shear strength decreasing as compression steel ratio increased. Discussion is followed by closure from the authors.