Databank of Concentric Punching Shear Tests of Two-Way Concrete Slabs without Shear Reinforcement at Interior Supports

Abstract

Hundreds of laboratory experiments have been conducted to date to investigate the punching shear behavior of two-way reinforced concrete (RC) slabs at interior supports. These experiments provide a mandatory frame of reference for the development, calibration and evaluation of punching shear design provisions. Unfortunately, because of the lack of dissemination and unavailability of some of the references together with some level of arbitrariness by researchers and code developers in selecting reference data, code provisions have been developed based on a rather limited subset of the available test results. To overcome these limitations, a task group was formed within ACI Committee 445 to gather, compile and post-process the results from laboratory tests studying the concentric punching shear behavior of two-way RC slabs without shear reinforcement at interior supports. The development of the databank involved two stages: first, the creation of a “collected” databank, where the characteristics of test specimens and test results were compiled as faithfully as possible to what was reported by researchers. Secondly, the development of a “selected” databank based on a series of Data Acceptance Criteria (DAC), with the goal of endorsing a test result into an evaluation-level databank. This paper describes the creation process and main features of the collected databank and discusses several important aspects in databank development including the selected platform being used to disseminate the information to users.