Performance of Ferro-Cement Strengthened Unreinforced Masonry Walls against Reverse Cyclic Loading

Unreinforced masonry (URM) buildings constitute a significant part of existing buildings in Sri Lanka and especially in the south-eastern region because it is low cost and easy to construct. Past ground tremors had shown that these buildings are highly vulnerable to seismic and ground vibration due to the low strength of brick masonry. In the last two decades, several seismic retrofitting techniques for masonry buildings have been developed and practiced, but rarely validated with experimental results and numerical modelling. The purpose of this study is to develop a seismic retrofitting technique to be adopted with locally available materials and an easy retrofitting method suitable for the particular masonry structures.

 

Brick masonry panels (600 x 640 x 215mm) were cast and cyclic loading tests were carried out for two types of walls: walls without applying retrofitting technique and walls retrofitted with Ferro-cement belts. Ferro-cement belts have been increasingly used owing to the strength, easy application and low cost. Here, the effect of different retrofitting configurations with Ferro-cement coating on the in-plane cyclic performance of brick walls with openings was examined. Experiments conducted in this study revealed that Ferro-cement belt retrofitted walls horizontally and vertically significantly increased its in-plane strength and ductility capacity.