Abstract:
Masonry, through its long history, is widespread used around the world and
still remains a main building material in many places especially developing
countries. However a poorly designed masonry is known as brittle and
susceptible to earthquakes. To improve masonry seismic capacity,
polypropylene band retrofitting technique was purposed based on economic
point of view and local availability of material and skilled labor. In this
study, we proposed the 3-D Applied Element Method as an analysis tool to
help understanding the polypropylene band retrofitted masonry behavior
which will be benefit in the future design process. Unlike the previous
version, 3-D Applied Element Method elements can be any rectangular
prism which helps reducing the number of elements. Brick and mortar
springs are represented by using different spring properties. Nonlinear
constitutive law of the mortar spring employed the Gambarotta model which
considers the material softening. Polypropylene band is modeled as beam
element using conventional plastic constitutive law connected together with
the masonry by elastic spring representing the polypropylene band to brick
connector. The numerical simulation of non-retrofitted and retrofitted out of plane wallets shows that with the suitable selected parameter the
behavior of masonry can be closely reproduced
