Abstract:
The collapse of unreinforced masonry structures, which are widely distributed around the earthquake prone
regions of the world, is one of the greatest causes of death in major earthquake disasters. This paper presents an
innovative retrofitting method for masonry structures, which uses bamboo band arranged in a mesh fashion and
embedded in a mortar overlay. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed retrofitting technique, shake
table tests were conducted using retrofitted and non-retrofitted 1/4 scaled masonry houses with sinusoidal ground
motion inputs. Based on the experimental results, the retrofitted specimen exhibited good seismic performance
withstanding over twice larger input energy than what non-retrofitted specimen could do.
