Seismic behavior of the brick masonry rural building strengthened with polypropylene grid cement mortar coating: Shaking table tests

Abstract

Brick masonry structures are widely applied around the world, especially in Chinese rural areas, but their seismic performance is not satisfactory due to high brittleness of material and poor integrity of structure. Accordingly, a low-cost and highly efficient strengthening method for brick masonry structure is needed. This paper presents the shaking table tests for a 1/2-scale single-story brick masonry rural building strengthened with polypropylene grid cement mortar coating. The damage states of the test model under earthquake motions with different intensity were observed. The dynamic characteristics including natural frequency and damping ratio were discussed. The seismic response, such as acceleration, displacement, torsion angle, base shear and hysteretic energy dissipation, were analyzed. The results show that the weak areas of the test model were the corners of windows and door, the intersections between longitudinal wall and transverse wall and the top of longitudinal walls. With the input PGA of 1.0 g, the natural frequencies of the test model in the X and Y directions decreased to 93.1 % and 88.2 % of the initial values, respectively, the damping ratio in the X and Y directions increased to 2.56 and 1.61 times the initial values, respectively, and the maximum story drift and horizontal torsion angle were 1/122 and 0.0037 rad, respectively. The comparison between actual earthquake damage and test results showed that the use of polypropylene grid cement mortar coating to strengthen brick masonry rural building could result in good seismic behaviors.