Experimental study on seismic behavior before and after retrofitting of masonry walls using FRP laminates

Abstract

Masonry buildings are the most common and seismically vulnerable structures in the rural areas of China. However, 2008 Sichuan earthquake has showed that failure of masonry walls is one of the major causes of material damage and loss of human life due to seismic events. Therefore, this work presents an experimental program that investigates in-plane seismic behaviour of common types of shale masonry shear walls before and after retrofitting using fibre-reinforced polymers (FRP). The motivation of the present work is associated with the important influence that the FRP introduce as an effective and affordable retrofitting technique for masonry members. To achieve this goal, a total of four half-scale shale masonry walls, two walls with door opening and the other two are solid, were subjected to combined uniformly distributed constant vertical load and incrementally increased in-plane lateral load. This paper analyzed the general behaviour of the shear walls before and after retrofitting based on lateral load-Top displacement curves and the action of the FRP laminates to masonry shear walls. The test results indicated that the FRP system remarkably increases the lateral load ca-pacity of retrofitted walls. Moreover, during the later loading stages, FRP Sheets were effective in enhancing the stiffness of retrofitted walls. © 2011 Tsinghua University Press, Beijing and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.