Factors influencing the out-of-plane behavior of FRP strengthened masonry walls – CICE 2012

Proceedings of CICE 2012 6th International Conference on FRP Composites in Civil Engineering - Rome, Italy, 13-15 June 2012

Abstract:
Masonry walls are subjected to compression, shear, bending or combination of them. As the compressive strength of masonry components is significantly higher than their tensile or bending strength, they are usually used to bear the compression loads. However, masonry walls may be subjected to lateral loads in the plane of the wall(in-plane loads) and perpendicular to the plane of the wall (out-of-plane loads), caused by earthquake or wind. Failure due to out-of-plane loading in URM walls causes the majority of materials damages and loss of human life. The main objective of this research is to investigate the out-of-plane behavior of FRP strengthened masonry walls. In this research, some large-scale masonry walls are constructed and strengthened with FRP composites. The walls with different thicknesses, simply supported on four edges are subjected to uniformly distributed load (UDL) on one side applied by an airbag over the whole surface of the wall. The effects of applying external FRP reinforcement at walls with different thicknesses have been studied.

Keywords: Airbag, FRP, Out-of-plane, masonry, Strengthening