Assessment of the mechanical behaviour of tabique walls through experimental tests

Abstract

The option for substituting timber structures by other materials when renovating old constructions often leads to more invasive solutions, less compatible with the existing structure, being often the cause for more damage. On the contrary, low invasive procedures, such as preservation actions, generates more sustained and respectful interventions, closer to the recommendations expressed in international charts and documents. However, such procedure simply having a good knowledge on the materials (properties and characteristics) and behaviour of the elements (mechanical, static, dynamic, long term, short term…). The present research aims contributing to this knowledge, by assessing, experimentally, the compression mechanical behaviour of a particular type of timber walls commonly found in old masonry constructions in Portugal and referred to tabique walls; the lack of data on the behaviour of this type of walls is probably the main reason why interventions quite often consider their full substitution by new elements. The work consisted on constructing 4 full scale specimens that were tested at the Laboratory of Earthquake and Structural Engineering of the Faculty of Engineering of Porto University to assess the compression strength and behaviour of these elements under no initial damage conditions. The results were also compared to numerical simulations using SAP2000 software.