An inverse analysis procedure for material parameter identification of mortar joints in unreinforced masonry

Flexural Tension in Unreinforced Masonry

Unreinforced masonry is that in which the tensile strength of the masonry is taken into consideration in design. Allowable out-of-plane tensile stress values are a function of the mortar type, such as Portland cement/lime mortar vs. masonry cement mortar or type M or S mortar vs. type N mortar. The allowable tensile stress is also a function of the masonry construction, such as tension parallel...

An experimental evaluation of prediction models for the mechanical behavior of unreinforced, lime-mortar masonry under compression

Effective stiffness of unreinforced brick masonry walls

Code design of Unreinforced Masonry (URM) buildings is based on elastic analysis, which requires as input parameter the effective stiffness of URM walls. Current approaches estimate the effective stiffness as fixed ratio of the gross sectional stiffness but comparisons with experimental results have shown that this does not yield satisfactory predictions. In this paper, a recently developed ana...

Testing unreinforced masonry structures at reduced scale

When testing multi-story structures on a shaking table, most testing facilities require a reduced scale model. Producing scale test units at small scale is particularly challenging for unreinforced masonry structures. Previous work by other researchers showed that scaling of units and mortar joints is mandatory in order to obtain for the reduced scale masonry failure modes, which are similar to...

Scaling unreinforced masonry for reduced-scale seismic testing

When testing multi-storey structures, most testing facilities require the testing of a reduced-scale model. A literature review on tests of scaled masonry structural components revealed that scaling of masonry was rather challenging and often significant differences in stiffness, strength and failure mechanisms between the different sized masonry were reported. This paper addresses the scaling ...