Experimental out-of-plane bending behaviour of brick masonry walls with a novel bed joint reinforcement

Abstract

The paper presents an experimental program aimed at assessing the out-of-plane bending behaviour of brick masonry walls with a novel sys-tem for bed joint reinforcement, named Murfor® Compact, which consists of high-strength steel cord mesh held together by an interwoven fiberglass rov-ing. This solution is currently used largely in the European market for differ-ent structural applications, such as walls subjected to horizontal loads derived from the action of the wind or earthquake, lintels subjected to vertical loads, and non-structural applications, e.g., crack control and expanding movement joint spacing. The experimental research consisted in the execution of out-of-plane bending tests on unreinforced and reinforced masonry walls of di-mensions 1.225 × 1.220 × 0.109 m3, following the EN 1052-2 standard. The study investigates the effect of the reinforcement amount on the out-of-plane bending behaviour by changing the separation between reinforced bed joints in the walls. The use of the digital image correlation technique allowed mon-itoring the propagation of cracks throughout the execution of the out-of-plane bending tests, since the development of the first crack and beyond the maxi-mum capacity reached by the wall. The results of the experimental campaign show that the walls reinforced with Murfor® Compact exhibit a very good increase of the flexural strength and a remarkable ductility with a gradual softening in the post-peak regime, due to the mesh configuration with high-strength chords distributed uniformly throughout the depth of the bed joint. The outcomes of the research demonstrate the suitability of this modern bed joint reinforcement concept in terms of mechanical performance, besides other advantages like material, time and money savings in reinforced ma-sonry construction.