Layane Hamzeh, Ahmed Hassanein and Khaled Galal
Layane Hamzeh, Ph.D. graduate, Department of Building, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Concordia University, 1515 St. Catherine West, Montreal, QC, Canada, layan.hamze@live.com
Ahmed Hassanein, Postdoctoral fellow, Department of Building, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Concordia University, 1515 St. Catherine West, Montreal, QC, Canada, Ahmed.Hassanein@concordia.ca
Khaled Galal, Professor, Department of Building, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Concordia University, 1515 St. Catherine West, Montreal, QC, Canada, khaled.galal@concordia.ca
ABSTRACT
Reinforced masonry (RM) shear walls with boundary elements (BE) have been recently presented as a ductile alternative to RM rectangular shear walls. The present study addresses the applicability of reinforcing masonry shear walls with glass fibre-reinforced polymer (GFRP) bars to attain reasonable strength and drift. GFRP-RM shear walls are a corrosion-free lateral resisting system that is transparent to magnetic fields and radio frequencies and nonconductive thermally and electrically. A numerical macro-model is developed using OpenSees to simulate the in-plane
response of flexure-dominated reinforced masonry shear walls with boundary elements (RMSW+BE). The model was validated against experimentally tested walls from the literature. The boundary elements were designed with C-shaped masonry blocks. A numerical study is performed on ten flexure-dominated shear walls to evaluate the influence of different design parameters on the inelastic behaviour of RMSW+BEs reinforced with GFRP bars under quasistatic fully reversed cyclic loading. The investigated parameters are transverse hoop spacing, amount of vertical reinforcement in the boundary element, and aspect ratio of the wall. The influence of the design parameters on the hysteretic response, stiffness degradation, and effective
stiffness was investigated to evaluate the enhancement in the seismic performance of RM buildings with RMSW+BE.
KEYWORDS: masonry, shear walls, GFRP, seismic response, boundary elements
