Assessment of Shear Strength Models of Reinforced Concrete Columns

Shear strength is a crucial parameter in designing Reinforced Concrete (RC) columns considering the effects of lateral loads such as wind or earthquakes. Numerous design codes and published studies have proposed equations for calculating the shear strength of RC columns. However, a discrepancy exists between the calculated models and the experimental results. The aim of this study is to evaluate the calculated models for the shear strength of rectangular RC columns based on 735 data sets, obtained from the literature. Six code-based and empirical models are investigated in this paper. The four code-based models include ACI 318 (2014), CSA (2014), Eurocode 8 (2005), and FEMA 273 (1997), and the two empirical models are proposed by Ascheim & Moehle (1992) [8] and Sezen & Moehle (2004) [9]. The shear strengths of RC columns are calculated for the six models using inputs from the experimental database. Finally, the results are evaluated using statistical indicators, including coefficient of determination and root-mean-squared error. The results reveal that Eurocode 8 (2005) is the best model, followed by Sezen & Moehle (2004) and Canada CSA (2014) since the results of those models are close to the experimental ones and shown to be more conservative than the others.