Nicola Tarque and Daniel Quiun
Nicola Tarque, Professor, Department of Engineering, Gerdis Research Group, Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, Av Universitaria 1801, San Miguel Lima, Perú, sntarque@pucp.edu.pe
Daniel Quiun, Professor, Department of Engineering, Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, Av Universitaria 1801, San Miguel Lima, Perú, dquiun@pucp.edu.pe
ABSTRACT
In Peru, more than 50% of the housing buildings are made of confined masonry, but many have several constructive defects. In Lima (more than 10 million inhabitants) this percentage
increases to around 80%, and about 75% of these, are non-engineered. The defects include low resistant materials, irregular structures, inadequate locations and soft soil conditions. In the eventuality of an earthquake, many of such structures may suffer severe damage and collapses. Therefore, it is important to study how to improve the structural safety of those masonry
buildings, using industrial strengthening with good quality and adequate strength. This paper shows the experimental tests carried out on small walls, built with horizontallyhollow clay bricks (called “pandereta”), performed at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. The specimens included masonry without strengthening and masonry with three types of strengthening: welded wire mesh, steel fiber, and basalt fiber, the last two known as Textile Reinforced Mortar (TRM). The “pandereta” bricks should only be used for partition nonstructural walls in seismic zones. However, in Peru, frequently, such walls act as bearing walls. The objective of this study is to improve the capacity and ductility behavior, for several types of strengthening that can be applied to the “pandereta” masonry walls. The experimental results show that the small walls strengthened with welded wire mesh or TRM improve the shear
strength of masonry. While the strengthening with welded wire increases the thickness of the strengthened walls, the TRM ones do not increase the thickness significantly.
KEYWORDS: experimental tests, horizontally-hollow bricks, pandereta, seismic strength, textile reinforced mortar, welded mesh
