The main objective of the present paper is to develop a plastic strut-and-tie model as a design tool for the shear resistance of exterior and interior connections. The proposed design approach herein is simple, however it accounts for various factors such as equilibrium conditions, geometrical configurations, effective concrete strength, concrete softening, vertical and horizontal steel quantities, failure modes, and column load level and type. The correlation between the predicted joint shear of several beam-column connections are compared with different experimental results in twenty-nine sources of literature. The provisions of the joint shear strength and the transverse hoop reinforcement of design codes are compared with the proposed design method. Finally, case studies are performed in order to demonstrate the variations in hoop requirements caused by the main parameters in the shear resistance. |