Developing Hydrostatic Beehive Brickwork

Abstract

In this paper, a new masonry construction is proposed based on honey beehive cell internal geometry as a unique structure and hydrostatic pressure principle. The considered experimental program involved suggestion, manufacturing, testing and analysis of masonry specimens of honey beehive units’ arrangement as well as corresponding specimens of custom arrangement, two classes of cementations bonding mortars are used. Plan strain concept and Saint Venant’s principle are adopted to model and assign proper boundary conditions of testing specimens. The significant improvement of masonry construction bearing capacity is confirmed by the obtained results and could be related to the presence of internal or self-confining pressure, which is produced due to the specific internal geometry of proposed honey beehive units’ arrangement of hexagonal construction units. The obtained results show that, the masonry specimens of proposed honey beehive arrangement Mode II exhibited higher bearing capacity in term of ultimate and service loads besides stiffness improvement in comparison with the customary arrangement Mode I.

Keywords

• brick units’ arrangement
• cementitious bonding mortar
• flexibility
• hydrostatic pressure
• masonry construction