Abstract
Rehabilitation, strengthening, and retrofitting of existing masonry buildings represent an important challenge for the construction engineering field. Often, slab strengthening/retrofitting is performed by replacing existing timber and steel beams or by adding new beams to improve the slab load-carrying capacity. The computation of the stresses at the beam–masonry interface (i.e., the contact pressure) is crucial to properly design the beam support length, preventing local failure of masonry and beam. This paper presents a simple analytical procedure to compute the contact pressure at the beam–masonry interface. The analytical procedure is validated by comparison between analytical and corresponding numerical results obtained by finite element modeling. Different types of beam (solid and laminated timber beams and steel beams) were considered, as well as different support conditions (simply resting on the wall considering different support lengths or fully embedded). The results obtained show that the method proposed is simple and reliable, which makes it suitable for professional practice.
Highlights
Structural rehabilitation of historical masonry buildings often involve replacement or strengthening of existing slabs
Timber beams can be strengthened by increasing their cross-section height adding glued wooden boards [6] or using externally bonded (EB) or near-surface-mounted (NSM) reinforcement, usually made by steel or fiber-reinforced polymer (FRP) bars and laminates
One of the issues associated with designing these operations is the definition of the contact pressure distribution between the beams and the supporting masonry walls, which is essential to verify that the masonry under the beams is able to adequately resist the new applied load [12]
Summary
Structural rehabilitation of historical masonry buildings often involve replacement or strengthening of existing slabs. Accurate models were proposed in the literature, they are too complex to be adopted in common practice [19] For this reason, it is crucial to have a fast and reliable method to estimate the contact pressure between the masonry wall and the beam resting on it. The issue of determining the contact pressure between beams and supporting masonry walls is not properly addressed in the scientific literature, and no simple design formulations, suitable for common practice, are available. No specific calculation is carried out to verify the stress distribution at the beam end, which can result in service and structural issues and reduce the slab and masonry durability. The results obtained show that the proposed method allows for a simple and reliable design of the support conditions able to guarantee proper functionality of the structure
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