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 the earthquake.
To improve their seismic capacity, polypropylene band retrofitting technique method was
purposed base on economic point of view and local availability of material and skilled
labor. In this study, we proposed 3-D Applied Element Method as analysis tools 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.
