Behavior of Masonry Buildings using Shock Table

Abstract

Masonry is the most important construction material in the history of the mankind. It has been used in a wide forms, as a basic construction material for public and residential buildings in past several thousand years. In urban areas, despite advancements in concrete and steel technology still masonry are used for low cost housings and for concrete and steel structures as infills to serve various functions. Thus, masonry wall used as infills and treated as non-structural element. However, masonry wall can be treated as structural element with following experimental design methodology. It has beeen found that masonry walls or infills perfor better under gravity load unlike lateral load. Recent earthquakes in indian subcontinent like Latur (1993) and Kutch (2001) shows structures made of masonry performed very badly and leads to collapse. In order to make these elements to perform better against Earth- quake, various Earthquake resistant features like use of Lintel Band, Roof Band, Containment reinforcement,etc have bean proposed in various litera- ture. The project aims towards understanding behavior of masonry structure with diferent Earthquake resisting features against Earthquake. Two Earthquake resisting features, namely Vertical Reinforcement at corner of building with Lintel band and corner of building reinforced by wire mesh are adopted. Half-scale models made-up of bricks are constructed on Shock Table and subjected to nos. of pendulum blows. Acceleration at important points on building models as well as at shock table are measured through Accelerom- eters, Data Acquisition system and computer system. apart, to velidate experimental results, an analytical model is developed based on Finite Ele- ment through ABAQUS. Results obtained by Experimental and Numerical models are compared. A good agreement among Experimental and Analyt- ical models are found. It is found that acceleration in building is 1.5 time amplify as compared to shock table.