Unreinforced masonry (URM) walls comprise vertical piers and horizontal spandrels, which together form the lateral load resisting system. Whereas past research yielded significant advances in the understanding of the force–deformation characteristics of masonry piers, knowledge of the behaviour of masonry spandrels is lacking. This paper makes a contribution to our understanding of the seismic ...

A thin layer of ductile fiber-reinforced mortar material referred to as Engineered Cementitious Composites, or ECC has been experimentally investigated as a seismic retrofit for unreinforced masonry infill walls in non-ductile reinforced concrete frames. Compression tests of masonry prisms retrofitted with 13mm of ECC were conducted representing the compression strut of a masonry infill under i...

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...

A ground-penetrating radar with polarimetric capability has been used for investigating masonry walls. The obtained results show that hollow spaces inside masonry give a well-detectable polarimetric signature that can be usefully used for detecting internal cavities in walls, and for characterizing the masonry. r 2007 Published by Elsevier Ltd.

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...

The main components which affect the earthquake damage grades classification of multistory masonry buildings and the damage characters are summarized and analyzed through the statistics and analysis of a large number of previous earthquake damage data. According to the standard of earthquake damage grades classification, the damage numbers of each component of multistory masonry buildings under...

Laboratory experimental data is often erroneous. This error is more apparent in data obtained from testing of anisotropic composite materials such as masonry wall panels. In this paper data colleted from the laboratory tests of masonry panels is presented. Methodologies for reducing (correcting) error in laboratory tested data are discussed. The concept of stiffness/strength corrector to model ...

On April 25, 2015, a M7.8 earthquake rattled central Nepal; ground motion recorded in Kantipath, Kathmandu, 76.86 km east of the epicenter suggested that the low-frequency component was dominant. We consider data from eight aftershocks following the Gorkha earthquake and analyze ground motion characteristics; we found that most of the ground motion records are dominated by low frequencies for e...

One of the parameters identified as influencing the structural response of buildings is the dynamic Modulus of Elasticity of masonry. The Longitudinal Vibration Test Method and the Ultrasonic Pulse Methods were developed for the dynamic testing of concrete specimens. These two dynamic procedures are to be tested on masonry prisms to provide a verification of the methods. The first aim of this p...

This paper presents an experimental program dealing with the shear strengthening with FRP systems of URM walls built with concrete and clay units. Ten concrete and five clay masonry panels, strengthened with FRP composites in the form of laminates and rods, and stainless steel, were loaded along the wall diagonal to observe their shear performance. The dimension of the concrete masonry panels w...