Effect of Textile Reinforced Mortar components on the mechanical behavior of historical masonry structures under cyclic loading

Abstract

Masonry structures without reinforcement are generally considered unsuitable in seismically active areas due to their poor performance as a bracing system.Historical masonry is particularly affected by this issue. The need to find solutions to this problem has attracted the interest of the scientific community to preserve this cultural heritage.Textile reinforced mortar (TRM) has proven his efficiency to reinforce masonry structures and various researches have investigated this concept of reinforcement in the case of diagonal compression tests. Despite this, several parameters must be studied in order to optimize this reinforcement technique in boundary conditions close to seismic situation.The study presented here aimed at assessing the effect of varying the mesh size of the textile and the orientation of its threads in strengthening historical masonry constructions with testing conditions similar to those of an earthquake (cyclic tests). It also aimed to assess the influence of varying lime mortar on the reinforcement performance by using two different limes in the TRM reinforcement.The principal additional knowledge of the present work is to point out the effect of mesh orientation and mesh opening in terms of dissipated energy and in terms of delaying the debonding time of TRM (a longer time for the multidirectional EQ grid) which is the main issue in the case of TRM structural reinforcement.An increase in peak load (+110 % for RW-EQ-L2) and in the dissipated energy (+200 % for RW-EQ-L2) were hence observed during the tests. These results provide valuable information about masonry walls strengthening and repair for the scientific community.