Half-joint beam design based on the CFP theory

Abstract

The present work complements recent attempts to investigate the causes of vulnerabilities inherent in half-joint structures. Herein, such vulnerabilities are attributed to shortcomings of the mechanism of force transfer underlying the adopted methods of design, rather than the detailing of the specified reinforcement as widely believed. The work is intended to demonstrate that the forces in half-joint beams are transferred by beam action, and not by the strut-and-tie mechanisms assumed to develop in the presence of the specified reinforcement. Through the use of the compressive force-path method, which has been developed on the basis of a beam mechanism of load transfer, it is shown that the predictions of half-joint beam behaviour correlates closely with the findings of a finite-element analysis package which was at first shown to be capable of successfully reproducing the experimentally-established structural behaviour of such beams.