Analytical study on seismic performance of bed joint reinforced solid brick masonry walls

Abstract

It is notable that brick work structures endure a lot of harm during seismic tremors, prompting huge loss of lives. Practically 75% of the disaster, credited to seismic tremor in a century ago, is because of breakdown of workmanship structures [1]. A greater part of the apartments in India are Unreinforced Masonry (URM) structures that are powerless and helpless much under moderate quakes and due to high wind forces out-of-plane action is acting on the wall which makes a severe damage at high wind loads and it is well known that Reinforced masonry construction has got a significant number of advantages than the masonry without reinforcement, whose application is very less in Indian construction practices and still there are no specified codes prescribed and in most constructions there been used shear walls instead of reinforced masonry walls even at the moderate earthquakes [2]. On the other hand, a great need to focus on understanding masonry buildings that are subjected to both axial loaded and seismic loads [3]. The main objective of this paper is to study the methods available in the literature to obtain the seismic vulnerability of un-reinforced masonry walls using linear static analysis [4]. To achieve this, analysis (Staad.Pro software) have been carried out as a part of this research. Two walls with same dimensions with an unreinforced and bed type reinforced masonry were analysed under uniaxial loading. A constant axial compressive load was maintained for each specimen during the analysis [5]. Idealized Load vs Deflection plots are used to describe the wall deflections and maximum stresses evolved by using STAAD.Pro. The final outcome of this performance analysis declares the efficiency of Reinforced masonry walls over the masonry walls without reinforcement under both axial and seismic loads (Load vs Maximum shear stress).