Civil Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
7.11
CUTTING OFF OR BENDING BARS (CONTINUED)
This section presents a few concluding remarks concerning the cutting off of bars, a topic
that was introduced in Section 7.1. The last several sections have offered considerable in-
formation that affects the points where bars may be cut off. Here we give a summary of
the previously mentioned requirements, together with some additional information. First,
a few comments concerning shear are in order.
When some of the tensile bars are cut off at a point in a beam, a sudden increase in the
tensile stress will occur in the remaining bars. For this increase to occur there must be a rather
large increase in strain in the beam. Such a strain increase quite possibly may cause large ten-
sile cracks to develop in the concrete. If large cracks occur, there will be a reduced beam
cross section left to provide shear resistance—and thus a greater possibility of shear failure.
Los Angeles County water project. (Courtesy of The Burke Company.)
