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.
