Out-of-Plane Performance of Strengthened Unreinforced Brick Wall of Historic Buildings

摘要

The investigation concentrates at the out-of-plane damage behavior and its strengthening methods for the brick walls of historic buildings. The walls are constrained in the two vertical edges and lower edge. The strengthening methods adopted in this study can be divided in three categories. The first category applies confine member along the upper edge of the wall. The confine member includes steel plate and U shape steel cover beam. The second category applies horizontal band of carbon fiber, glass fiber, and stainless wire mesh to strengthen the upper edge of the brick wall. The third category uses both of horizontal and vertical bands to strengthen the wall in two directions. Totally, there are 9 brick specimens (215cmx154cmx11cm) are made and tested under statically horizontal load. According to the experiment, the damage mode of the unreinforced specimen is formed by following stages: (1) a major central vertical crack occurred; (2) two inclined cracks extending from the central crack to the corner of wall specimen; (3) finally, an U-shape crack near the three constrained edges is observed. In the three strengthening categories, the specimens strengthened by confine members have shown an increase of 100% for ultimate load. The specimens strengthened by horizontal bands have the increase of 40%~100%, depending on the band materials used. For the specimens strengthened by horizontal bands associated with vertical bands, an ultimate load that increases 90~200% is obtained.