Shear strength prediction using dimensional analysis and functional networks

This paper presents a three steps methodology for predicting the failure shear effort in concrete beams. In the first step, dimensional analysis is applied to obtain several sets of dimensionless variables; in the second step, functional and neural networks are used to estimate a relation between those variables and, in the last step, the failure shear effort is recovered from the relations learnt. Finally, the performance of the methodology was validated using data from shear strength experiments.