Editorial: Themed issue on shear

摘要

It was at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that we became aware of the basic behaviour of reinforced concrete in flexure. In the previous hundred years, the position of the neutral axis in an elastic beam was the subject of continuing debate. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the first proposals for a model to describe the behaviour in shear, the truss analogy, were made and have been of use ever since. It is not surprising, therefore, that with the example of these protracted time lines the debate on shear persists.