Structural Engineering & Statics
where the load goes
Concept

Failure surface — where it appears

A surface rather than a plane on which a check is made, which is what a punching cone, a yield line pattern and a rough crack all have in common. It exists because no plane cut isolates the load, so equilibrium has to be written on a surface the failure chooses rather than one the analyst does.

Named by 4 essays across 2 fields — each of them below, with the objects they name alongside it.

A check made on a perimeter, not on a section. One bay of a flat slab, 7.2 m square, on a 400 × 400 mm column. The heavy closed line is the control perimeter, 2d from the column face with its corners rounded at that radius — 4427 mm long against 1600 mm round the column itself. The shaded area inside it delivers no shear across it and is subtracted from the load; everything outside arrives through the perimeter. At 12 kN/m² that is 604 kN across 4427 × 225 mm, a shear stress of 0.606 N/mm² against a resistance of 0.658.

A check made on a perimeter, not on a section

Every shear check in this collection is made on a plane cut through a member. A slab sitting on a column has no such plane, because the shear leaves in every direction at once — so the check is made on a closed line, and a line grows with the column while the load grows with the square of the bay.

internal-forces · Punching shear The coefficient is a slope, and that is why it can exceed one. The crack magnified: two rough faces, drawn as a sawtooth at 54° to the plane. Sliding one over the other cannot happen without lifting it, so a shear displacement forces a separation in fixed proportion — the tangent of that angle, which is the number written down as a coefficient of friction and here is 1.40. The bars crossing the plane are stretched by the separation and clamp the faces back together; they are not carrying the shear, they are supplying the normal force that lets the roughness carry it. A bar that is not anchored on both sides supplies nothing.

Shear across a crack that is already there

Every shear calculation in this collection starts from an uncracked solid — a principal stress, a shear flow, a diagonal tension. This one starts after the crack, on a plane with no tensile strength at all, and the coefficient it uses is not a coefficient of friction. It is the slope of the roughness.

internal-forces · Shear friction A strength with no mechanism in it, made of four. The shear a member carries with no links in it, split into the mechanisms that carry it, against the member's effective depth on a logarithmic axis. The three bands are calibrated to Taylor's measured shares at one 300 mm × 500 mm member and are then evaluated everywhere else, so the shape of the total is a prediction. Aggregate interlock is the band that dies: it depends on how tightly the crack faces are held together, crack width grows with member depth, and it falls from 62% of a shallow member's strength to 22% of a deep one's. That decay is the whole of the size effect, and the dashed line is the design code's fitted k = 1 + √(200/d), which knows nothing about interlock and falls by a factor of 1.52 where the model falls by 2.05 over the same twentyfold range. Dowel action is why the expression contains the flexural reinforcement ratio, which nothing in a truss analogy would predict.

The strength with no mechanism in it

A concrete member with no links in it carries shear, and the expression that says how much is three variables raised to fitted powers with a size term in front. There is no free body anywhere in it. What it is fitting is a competition between four things that carry shear across a crack, and only one of them explains why a deeper member is worse at it.

internal-forces · Concrete shear A bearing capacity is a mechanism, and here it is. Prandtl's collapse mechanism under a 3.0 m footing in a soil of 32° friction. A rigid wedge is driven down with the footing at 61° to the horizontal; a fan of radial shear turns the stress through exactly ninety degrees on a logarithmic spiral whose growth rate is tanφ; and a passive wedge at 29° has to be pushed up and out of the way. Nothing here is empirical — every angle is a function of φ alone — and the mechanism reaches 15.9 m from the centre, which is 10.6 times the footing's half width. That is why two footings closer together than about four widths do not have separate bearing capacities.

The ground is a mechanism

Bearing capacity is met as a formula with three terms and a table of coefficients, and that presentation hides what it is. Underneath is a plastic collapse mechanism — a rigid wedge, a fan of radial shear on a logarithmic spiral, and a passive wedge that has to be pushed up and out of the way — and every coefficient in the table is a property of that one drawing.

equilibrium · Bearing capacity

Named alongside it

The objects these essays reach for when they reach for this one.

Aggregate interlockSize effectClamping forceFree bodyReinforcement ratioShear frictionStrut-and-tieAnchorageBearing capacityBondCohesionCollapse mechanism

All concepts