Manicka Dhanasekar, Mengli Song and Jake Ring
Manicka Dhanasekar, Professor, School of Civil Engineering and Built Environment, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia, m.dhanasekar@qut.edu.au
Mengli Song, PhD Student, School of Civil Engineering and Built Environment, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia, mengli.song@hdr.qut.edu.au
Jake Ring, Engineer, Concrete Masonry Association of Australia, Sydney, engineer@thinkbrick.com.au
ABSTRACT
Reinforced concrete masonry walls are used extensively in multi-level buildings of heights up to 15m and they are also employed in the basement of taller buildings. In such applications, eccentricity in vertical loads are unavoidable; this research has been carried out with a view to understanding the response of the concrete masonry walls under concentric and eccentric compression. Compression capacity of the reinforced masonry walls are normally determined with no regard to the area of the compression steel reinforcement although some limited experimental studies in the literature exhibit contribution of the steel reinforcement to the capacity of the reinforced masonry. With a view to examining the contribution of the vertical reinforcing bars with and without lateral restraining steel bars, thirty-six walls of 1400mm high × 600mm long × 190mm thick walls have been constructed and tested under concentric and eccentric compression. Several sensors were fitted to the wall surfaces and reinforcing bars to monitor the strain levels and potential instability of the wall due to slenderness and/or eccentricity in the loading. The data are presented in this paper and the performance of the reinforced masonry walls to concentric and eccentric compression observed from the experiments is described.
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