Abstract
The material and structural performance of calcium silicate (CS) brick masonry has received relatively little attention in the past, although this material is often used for the construction of low-rise buildings in Central and Northern Europe. Upon the occurrence of induced seismicity in the north of the Netherlands, an extensive testing programme has been conducted since 2014 at Delft University of Technology. The paper presents the outcomes of eight quasi-static cyclic tests performed within this program on CS brick masonry walls under vertical and lateral in-plane loads. Different dimensions, boundary conditions and applied pre-compression loads were considered. Overall, the tests allowed to characterise the in-plane behaviour of CS brick masonry walls. The results confirmed the influence of the shear ratio (i.e. the ratio between the effective height and the length of the wall) on the wall response in terms of prevailing failure mode, initial stiffness, force and deformation capacity, energy dissipation. Besides, the experimental outcomes stressed the difficulty in estimating the effective stiffness and near collapse drift capacity. Additionally, an empirical equation is proposed to predict the peak lateral force. The equation, calibrated against the tests presented in this paper, was validated against an extended dataset of tests performed on CS masonry walls. The equation, which does not need any input of material parameters and is applicable irrespectively of the expected failure mode, can be used to estimate the force capacity of CS masonry walls when no or limited data on the material properties are available.
Highlights
Unreinforced masonry (URM) is an accessible, sustainable and popular building material
This paper presents the outcomes of an experimental investigation consisting of eight quasi-static cyclic tests performed on full-scale calcium silicate (CS) brick masonry walls
This masonry type was widely used in dwellings built between 1960 and 1980 in the province of Groningen, an area subjected to induced seismicity
Summary
Unreinforced masonry (URM) is an accessible, sustainable and popular building material. Among the different masonry typologies, the performance at material and structural scale of calcium silicate (CS) brick masonry received relatively little attention in the past. This type of masonry has been traditionally used in buildings with cavity wall systems, especially in terraced and detached houses built between 1960 and 1980, and such buildings can be mainly found in central and northern European countries that are characterised by low natural seismicity. A first experimental investigation was performed on CS masonry within the European project Enhanced Safety and Efficient Construction of Masonry Structures in Europe (ESECMASE) in the years 2004–2008, which aimed, inter alia, to improve the understanding of the behaviour of shear loaded masonry in typical masonry structures. CS block masonry was studied by Ötes and Löring (2003), Mojsilovic (2011), and Salmanpour et al (2015), and CS element masonry by van der Meer et al (2013), and Jafari et al (2018)
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