Agent66 said:
The dowels still need to comply in my mind as far as practical with all the wall provisions, spacing, min/max area, etc. They are part of the wall.
I agree that would change the picture for the better but are you really able to get that kind of interconnection between vertically stacked walls in NZ? Over here, we'll have just enough connection between walls so as to not run afoul of equilibrium and that's it.
Agent666 said:
...but also demonstrated that they lap with the wall reinforcement both sides of the joint which often requires a much longer lap than minimum code requirement
.
I agree with that too and think it a fine practice. It's also pretty easy to accomplish in a typical CIP wall where your bars are pretty close together and you're allowed to offset 6" before your into offset splice territory anyhow. I do wish that codes would speak directly to this practice though. The use case that initially got my hackles up about this was reading about seismic retrofits where frames are infilled with wall panels as shown below. No laps unless it's indirectly through beam stirrups I suppose.
Agent666 said:
...which is not the more or less distributed shear stress model we assuming in your typical reinforced concrete shear design.
This I get mixed messages about in the literature. Consider:
1) With shear friction you will often see recommendations about putting the reinforcement in the tension zone in acknowledgement that most of the action happens in the compression zone. Not distributed.
2) In
any flexural concrete member, I would argue that we don't actually assume a linear distribution of shear resistance and that, rather, the lion's share happens over the compressed zone. The cold joint example is quite similar to a pure flexural crack where there really is little to resist shear
other than the flexural compression zone. And this leads to an important feature lacking in the shear breakout mechanism of the first sketch that I posted here. That frustum at the end of the wall, presumably, also has a ton of compression applied to it which would surely improve it's shear resistance. In this respect, perhaps the joint becomes little different than the shear resistance mechanism at any, predominantly, flexural crack.
All of these things reinforce my feeling that some testing should be done on shear friction in the presence of significant flexure. The test setups that I've see in the literature for shear friction all simulate about as close to a pure shear situation as one could imagine. But many shear friction situations in the wild are accompanied by significant bending as well.