Experimental Study of Non-Engineering Confined Masonry Walls Retrofitted With Wire Mesh and Cement-Sand Mortar

Abstract eng:
The Peruvian standards for design of earthquake resistant buildings prescribe minimum requirements to ensure safety of life of inhabitants. Nevertheless, the lack of supervision resulted in the increase of non-engineered masonry dwellings. Nowadays, non-engineered masonry represents about 60% of buildings in Lima, according to the National Institute of Statistics and Informatics of Peru (INEI). This construction system is highly vulnerable to earthquakes and, consequently, most Peruvian citizens live under unacceptable seismic risk. In that sense, it is desirable to provide low-cost retrofitting techniques which require low-complexity construction to improve seismic capacity of confined masonry dwellings for less advantaged economic sectors. Confined masonry walls with the proposed retrofitting technique were tested for the purpose of studying its inelastic behavior by cyclic loading test. Two types of bricks are considered in this study, namely handmade solid bricks and industrial tubular bricks, both are fired clay bricks and massively used in urban areas. Experimental results are compared to study the improvement of the seismic capacity of confined masonry walls retrofitted with the proposed technique. Results showed that strength and ductility can be significantly increased by retrofitting with the proposed technique. Also, in order to verify the improvement of the seismic capacity of non-engineered dwellings using the proposed retrofitting technique, numerical simulations are conducted using nonlinear time-history analyses. These numerical simulations are performed using analytical models calibrated with experimental results to represent the inelastic behavior of those structures under representative earthquake records.

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