Synopsis
The power and ease-of-use of commonly available design office software packages allows the engineer to interrogate the shear field associated with punching shear when carrying out a linear elastic finite element analysis.
In the context of the second generation of Eurocodes, and specifically Eurocode 2 (2023), this article examines how this might be carried out, the issues and decisions faced by the engineer, and the expectation that increasing the level of refinement in an analysis will lead to a more favourable result than obtained from the use of the code-based expressions.