Fundamentally, I believe that your colleague is right Precast78. I also believe this issue to be the biggest single misconception commonly held by structural engineers.
Development length guarantees one thing and one thing only: the tensile stresses in your bars will be transferred to the surrounding concrete without initiating a bond stress style pullout failure. Once those tensile forces find their way into the surrounding concrete, development length does nothing to preclude the tensile breakout of that surrounding concrete.
Once rebar tension is transferred into the surrounding concrete, there are basically two fundamental mechanisms by which one can preclude tensile concrete breakout:
1) Utilize the diagonal tension resistance of the surrounding concrete. This basically amounts to appendix D or something akin to it.
2) Pass the rebar tension to a concrete compression strut. This mechanism encompasses strut and tie models and lap splices and is really just what we know of as
RC concrete design theory.
As for your
specific question, precast78, I would say that it depends. For the sake of argument, lets say that we're talking about 35M vertical bars embedded Ld into a 20m x 20m x 3m thick raft footing. Consider these scenarios:
1) A single 35M bar located at the center of the footing. In this case, I suspect that the bar yields. I don't say that because the bar is developed however. Rather, I say that because I've run the numbers on this using Appendix D equations applied with some judgment.
2) A group of tightly spaced 35M bars located at the center of the footing. In this case, I believe that the bars may initiate a concrete tension breakout failure before reaching their yield strength. This is what Appendix D style equations tell me when I run the numbers. And this has real world significance. I do this calculation to see if my shear wall zones will pull out of the raft footings that hold them down.
3) A single 35M bar located 50mm clear from the
edge of the raft footing. In this case, I believe that the bar will likely initiate a concrete tension breakout failure before reaching its yield strength. Again, this is what an Appendix D style check would indicate. Here, it's much worse than case #1 because of the eccentricity between the applied load and resisting mechanism. It's basically a breakout / pryout failure mode. I believe that TME was alluding to something similar with his comment regarding edge distances.
I think that it's also instructive to look at the set-ups used to test rebar development and described in ACI 430. They all supply a nearby concrete compressive strut that the rebar tension can be passed to.
I like to debate structural engineering theory -- a lot. If I challenge you on something, know that I'm doing so because I respect your opinion enough to either change it or adopt it.