Designing against size effect on shear strength of reinforced concrete beams without stirrups: II. verification and calibration

After theoretical derivation of the general form of the size effect formula for beam shear in the preceding Part I, this Part II presents experimental verification by least-square fitting of those existing individual data sets that have a broad size range. Subsequently, empirical prediction formulas for the size effect parameters, consisting of the asymptotic small-size strength v ₀ and the transitional size d ₀, are calibrated by least-square regression of (1) a recent American Concrete Institute database with 398 data points, and (2) a combination of this database with large-scale Japanese tests and Northwestern reduced-scale model tests. Previous alternative proposals for dealing with the size effect in beam shear are also discussed.