Bottle-shaped stress field solution for partially loaded reinforced concrete blocks

Abstract

Most existing approaches for the design of partially loaded areas in reinforced concrete – including design rules in international codes – are purely empirical, and based on experimental tests on unrein-forced concrete. In this paper, a bottle-shaped stress field solution for strip loading is presented and generalised for axisymmetric cases of partial area loading. The model is compared to experimental results as well as predictions obtained from existing models and design rules. While the correlation with the available experimental evidence is good, further experiments are required for verification, particularly for the case of heavily confined areas.