Experimental investigation and analytical calculations on shear strength of full-scale RC slabs with shear reinforcement for nuclear power plants

In this study, a series of 27 tests on 27 full-scale reinforced concrete (RC) slabs measuring 4 mx 2.6 m x 0.3 m is presented. RC slabs are frequently used in the construction of civil engineering structures such as buildings, car parks and bridges. They may be subjected to several types of forces acting, most often bending and shearing forces. Shearing forces have generally been more thoroughly investigated due to their brittle failure mode. This is especially the case for reinforced concrete slabs subjected to concentrated loads near to supports. Situations such as localized heavy loads from equipment and slabs loaded by walls or columns are commonly found and for constructability and cost-effectiveness reasons, shear reinforcement (stirrup) of concrete is an important issue in a power plant project. This new experimental study is a continuity of the previous studies conducted by Bui et al. (2017a, b) and Nana et al. (2017) in which all the slabs were tested without shear reinforcement. The originality in this study is that the slabs are this time studied with shear reinforcement except for references slabs. These full-scale slabs designed as usually in nuclear buildings, are submitted to a concentrated load near a linear support, the investigation of their shear behavior is presented. The main aim was to evaluate the influence of the shear reinforcement on the shear behaviour of slabs. The shear strength and the associated failure modes were quantified. Then we also addressed the influence of several variables such as bottom longitudinal reinforcement, tension and compression axial loads. Until now, rarely have experiments in the literature addressed the effect of the uniaxial load on the shear resistance of reinforced concrete slab. The experiments are used to evaluate the pertinence of Eurocode 2 for the shear design of reinforced concrete slabs in comparison with the French approach, the ACI 318-14 code and Model Code 2010 formulation using the level of approximation LoA II.