Aleksandar Kisin and Lisa R. Feldman
Aleksandar Kisin, Masonry Design Coordinator, Canada Masonry Design Centre – Saskatchewan Office, 300-701 Broadway, Saskatoon, SK, Canada, skisin@canadamasonrycentre.com
Lisa R. Feldman, Associate Professor, Department of Civil and Geological Engineering, University of Saskatchewan, 57 Campus Drive, Saskatoon, SK, Canada, lisa.feldman@usask.ca
ABSTRACT
A preliminary investigation was conducted at the University of Saskatchewan to evaluate the performance of mortars, used as a grout-like fill, to transfer tensile stresses between lapped bars. Canadian design standards do not explicitly prevent the use of mortar as a grout-like fill. Rather, Clause 8.2.1.1 in CSA A371 states that any such substitution should only be made under the discretion of the designer. In general, designers have tended to deny these requests due to the dearth of technical information related to the performance of mortars in this capacity. Full-scale wall splice specimens with contact lap splices, where the cell cavities were filled with a modified Type M mortar, were constructed and tested in a horizontal position under four-point monotonic loading. The results were compared to data acquired for specimens of a similar geometry filled with a code-compliant coarse grout. The results indicate that while possible to achieve similar results with a mortar modified to be deemed acceptable as a code-compliant coarse grout, additional test data is required to confirm the statistical significance of the results and to account for variations in bar size, lap splice length, and the re-tempering of mortar.
126
