Out of Plane Behavior of Masonry Infill Walls Retrofitted with a Reinforced Polymer Grid and Polyurea System

Abstract

Recent world events have illustrated that sustainability of buildings to blast loads is an ever increasing issue. Many older buildings contain unreinforced masonry (URM) infill walls. Due to their low flexural capacity and their brittle mode of failure, these walls have a low resistance to out-of-plane loads, including a blast load. As a result, an effort was undertaken to examine retrofit methods that are feasible to enhance their out-of-plane resistance. In previous masonry infill wall studies conducted by Carney and Myers (2005) and Myers et al. (2002), fiber reinforced polymers (FRP) fabrics and near surface mounted (NSM) techniques demonstrated increases in deformation ductility and energy ductility levels by three fold. However, these retrofit systems did not completely control the scatter of debris which could be a life safety issue. In this on-going research study the use of externally bonded reinforced polymer grid systems bonded with a polyurea is investigated to examine the feasibility of increasing the ductility in these retrofit systems and better controlling the scatter of debris. These systems have shown to increase the out-of-plane load capacity of the wall systems with improved ductility based on both an energy-based and deformation-based definition.

Department(s)

Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering

Keywords and Phrases

Composite Strengthening; Masonry Out of Plane Strengthening; Masonry Retrofit; Polyurea Grid System

Document Type

Article - Conference proceedings

Document Version

Citation

File Type

text

Language(s)

English

Rights

© 2006 The Electrochemical Society (ECS), All rights reserved.

Publication Date

01 Jan 2006

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