Out-of-plane strengthening of slender brickwork masonry partition walls with different types of glass fiber fabrics

Abstract

Non-structural masonry partition wall represents a relatively high risk for the occupants of the building even when subjected to the moderate earthquake loading due to its slenderness and brittle failure. The risk is higher for older public buildings where the non-structural partition walls are slenderer than in contemporary buildings and the importance of building is higher. Strengthening of the existing non-structural partition walls with glass fiber fabrics and façade meshes offers more sustainable option in comparison to their replacement by means of new drywall gypsum-card board walls and for that reason we conducted several out-of-plane cyclic tests to investigate the behavior of these walls in their weakest direction i.e. out-of-plane. All in all, eleven full scale partition walls were built with regular solid bricks and lime-cement mortar, where eight of them were strengthened with different glass fiber reinforcements and finally all tested under cyclic out-of-plane loading. The bond between the partition wall surface and reinforcing glass fiber fabric was ensured with the use of flexible polyurethane-based adhesive. Therefore, additional specially designed double leap shear-tensile test was conducted to evaluate the bond behavior. The bond between solid brick surface and glass fiber fabric tends to be stiffer in comparison to the option with glass fiber façade rendering mesh reinforcement. Results show that it is possible to provide a cost-effective improvement of the partition wall’s out-of-plane resistance by applying a simple glass fiber façade meshes with the use of flexible polyurethane adhesive.