Jike,
Reinforcement detail and anchor bolts in piers (or pile caps, or pedestals) are not well studied and standardized, in my opinion. The lack of research is remedied in practice somehow by conservative design. The following is what I know (may not be accurate) and what we do usually.
Anchor bolt, it’s right, all the capacity tables (from codes to company’s tables) are based on un-reinforced concrete. Although, in most cases, the pullout cone will intercept rebars (including anchors at center of a pier, if the embedment is deep enough, since the tip of the cone is at the anchor plate/head). I know Hilti did tests in reinforced concrete and acknowledges the benefit, but never gave a guide/table for bolts in a reinforced concrete base. Maybe the actual reinforcing is too case-by-case.
When subjected to shear, the anchor bolts need some edge distance to prevent lateral bursting or shear spalling off. (but, again, that distance is based on un-reinforced concrete.). In addition, we check the shear capacity of the bolts (metal material shear capacity) and bearing capacity of the concrete behind the bolts (the way of this check is quite diverse, usual way is to consider a 1/4 depth of bolt embedment or 5 diameter depth, whichever smaller, but someone uses more conservative calculation on this, I had a post on this the other day). But with axial force from the column, lots of shear transfer of the anchor bolts should be by “shear friction”. The ties however are rarely checked against the shear force like what we do in a concrete beam. Maybe because the section is a big mass, and because the ties are pretty close, less than d/2 for sure.
You are right, when in tension, the anchor bolts pull-out capacity is guaranteed by the number of bolts chosen by engineer and standardized embedments, which are calculated based on the rule that pryout is impossible prior to breakout of anchor bolts. However, not like in a beam design to consider the rebar development and splice. But if we do so, we can consider in a 45 degree angle (from anchor plate/head) the rebars in piers are intercepted, then to check whether the development length from that point is enough to develop the force in rebars you need. When a whole pier or pilecap is in tension, we should consider the pull-out capacity with tensile capacity of the whole section, but this is a rare case and rarely critical. In pilecaps, you can see frequently the anchor bolts directly overlap with the dowels from piles, in these cases, the vertical reinforcement in pilecap/pier is less important, sometimes just plays a role as the skeleton for ties.
