Use of non-elastic stress fields in the design of reinforced concrete deep beams

Two simply supported reinforced concrete deep beams with span-to-depth ratio of 1.8 and 0.9 were designed by direct design approach using non-elastic stress fields. An inplane elasto-plastic nonlinear finite-element program was used to generate the stress fields. The orthogonal reinforcement was designed using Nielsen-Clark equations. The beams were tested both numerically using a nonlinear finite-element program and experimentally using reinforced concrete beams 100 mm thick and a clear span of 900 mm to check their behaviour at both serviceability and ultimate limit state loads.