Strengthening load bearing masonry wall panels using locally available materials

Abstract

In past decades, many thousands of Un-Reinforced Masonry (URM) buildings were fully or partially damaged due to natural disasters such as earthquakes, tsunamis and storm surges, floods, cyclones and landslides. Therefore a considerable amount of studies and researches have been conducted to identify the response of the masonry buildings during natural disasters and to introduce effective and economical retrofitting techniques. In this research work an attempt has been made to investigate feasible and economical retrofitting methods suitable for countries like Sri Lanka. The laboratory test was carried out to investigate the effectivenes of selected three retrofitted methods against the shear failure of URMs. The test setup was implemented according to ASTM-E-519-02 standard guidelines which are available to investigate the in-plane diogonal shear strength. Test wallets would represent load bearing brick masonry. In order to verify the suitability of the proposed methods, masonry walls, with and without retrofit were subjected to diagonal shear test. Wallets were strengthened using bamboo strips, steel bracing and Poly-Propelene (PP) bands. Axial load and the diagonal deflection were measured during the experiment. From test results, it could be seen that pp-band mesh and bamboo strip mesh could improve in-plane shear capacity and ductiliy of structures together with no brittle collapsing while steel bracing could only improve shear capacity, but lost its stability with brittle failure.