Mechanical behaviour of masonry walls strengthened by BFRP composites

Abstract

This paper evaluates the in-plane mechanical behaviour of masonry walls strengthened by basalt fibre-reinforced polymer composite material. Based on the seismic performance tests of three masonry walls without any strengthening scheme and three walls with basalt fibre-reinforced polymer strengthening directly under increasing cyclic lateral loading and constant vertical compression loading, the damage characteristics of each specimen were observed. Besides, the ultimate shear strength and deformation performance, ratio of residual deformation, hysteretic behaviour, energy dissipation behaviour, degradation characteristics of bearing capacity and stiffness, fibre strain were analysed. The study results show that the strengthening technique of bonding basalt fibre-reinforced polymer composite material can effectively improve the ultimate shear strength and deformation performance, and the improvement extent of the latter is much larger than that of the former. Those basalt fibre-reinforced polymer-strengthened masonry walls show a distinct slowdown degradation of bear capacity and stiffness, and have better energy dissipation capacity as well as deformation recovery capability.