A Literature Review about the head-size effect on the capacity of cast-in anchors

The design and the verification of anchorage to concrete are currently covered by the so called “Concrete Capacity Design” approach, which is adopted in the most recent codes and national regulations. Although it is quite advanced, such an approach is built on a wide range dataset, which encompasses both cast-in and post-installed anchors with very different geometry and tested under different boundary conditions. As a result, the CCD method was developed in a consistent way adopting the simplifying assumption that some parameters, such as the head-size, have a negligible influence on the pull-out capacity of the anchoring system. As the head-size increases, some authors found that the method could be rather conservative, while others found that the method is still accurate. Within this context, a literature review of the research studies and of the available formulas for predicting the capacity of cast-in anchors is addressed in this paper, focusing on the effect of the head-size.