Experimental research on the seismic behavior of brick walls reinforced with dry-connected steel plate frames

Abstract

Currently, the seismic performance of masonry buildings needs to be improved due to their weak earthquake-resistant constructional measures. In this paper, a new method for integrally strengthening masonry walls by steel frames connected through bolts and welds was proposed. To investigate their seismic behavior, one unreinforced brick wall and four reinforced brick walls were fabricated for tests. The main parameters were the thickness of steel plates (3mm vs. 5mm vs. 8mm) and loading methods (reversed cyclic loading vs. monotonous loading). Experimental tests showed that the reinforcement method effectively improved the seismic performance of brick walls, especially the bearing capacity, ductility, and energy consumption. Increasing the thickness of steel plates effectively improved the ductility of brick walls. It is noted that the failure of the structure changed from shear failure to bending-shear failure due to the constraint caused by steel frames. The reinforced walls under reversed cyclic loading and monotonic loading exhibited similar failure modes, and the ductility of structures under monotonic loading was better.

Duan, Kangkang

PhD Student of Civil Engineering

Kangkang is a PhD student at the University of British Columbia. Previously, he received his BSc degree in Highway and Bridge Engineering from Southeast University (Mao Yisheng Class) in 2019. Then, he received his MASc degree in Civil Engineering from Southeast University in 2022. His research interests include robotics, artificial intelligence, AR/VR, and physical machine learning.