Beam Reinforcement - height of effective zone for crack width

[PhilippeDierckx]

Hi all

When reinforcing a beam in sofistik and calculating crack width; the height of the effective tension zone is important.

Sofistik should be applying following rules (EC set to NBN EN 1992-1 2005)

However, when checking the results with hand calculations, the (h-x)/3 component should in my case be the governing factor, however sofistik seems to not take this into account.

Does anyone have more background on how this is actually implemented or reasons why this is not considered

Newer Eurocodes follow other rules, maybe this could be a reason or are there other reasons ?

PS: i have a relative deep beam (but i don’t find documentation if sofistik considers this)

[JE170969]

The use of h − x or (h − x) / 3 as the height of the effective tension zone for the crack width verification (using RISS JA WK …) is no longer implemented in AQB.
As a conservative approach, we do not use these assumptions in order to obtain meaningful results for prestressed cross-sections. Unfortunately, this leads to uneconomical results for non-prestressed members.

AQB manual gives a short hint about that, see chapter 2.8.5 and attached screenshot.