Study on stress performance and free brickwork height limit of traditional chinese cavity wall

Abstract

Traditional Chinese cavity wall often suffers in-plane and out-of-plane damages in natural disasters like gales and earthquakes. However, the seismic and wind resistance of the cavity wall, an enclosure structure, are seldom studied in the engineering field. Instead, the disaster prevention and relief efforts are concentrated on the structural analysis and seismic damage of the main structure. Focusing on the bricklaying methods for 2 common types of cavity walls and 1 kind of solid wall, this paper designs a special loading device and uses it to examine the in-plane and out-of-plane stress performance of cavity wall and solid wall under the horizontal load. The results show that all out-of-plane damages have resulted from the flexural-bending failure of the bend; the cavity wall has far lower out-of-plane bearing capacity than the solid wall. Moreover, the free brickwork height limits of the cavity wall under the action of earthquake and wind load are deducted respectively, in reference to the schematic diagram of the internal force of the cantilever beam and on the basis of the measured flexural-tensile strength and shear strength. It is found that the out-of-plane performance controls the brickwork limits. The authors suggest that connecting structures should be installed on each floor if the cavity wall is to be connected with the main structure.

Keywords

• cavity wall
• flexural-tensile strength
• height limit
• in-plane pressure
• out-of-plane pressure
• shear strength