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 events. 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 determine the effectiveness
of the proposed retrofitting technique, shake table tests were conducted using retrofitted
and non-retrofitted 1/4 scaled masonry houses and each house was subjected to
sinusoidal ground motion inputs. Based on the experimental results, show that the
retrofitted specimen exhibited good seismic performance by withstanding a more than
twice input energy than non-retrofitted specimen.
