Civil Engineering / İnşaat Mühendisliği

Industry procedures to assess the risk of settlement-induced damage to masonry buildings ignore key aspects of the problem, such as the influences of building weight, façade openings, and floor structures. Experimental data are needed to characterise the influence of these aspects on damage. This paper describes tests on three brick masonry half-scale building models subjected to settlements. The use of scaling rules in choosing the model materials and kentledge, the settlement apparatus, and the cross-validation of displacement and strain measurements are presented. Comparative evaluation of building responses show that: (i) the distribution of building weight and the resulting in-situ stresses play a key role in determining compliance to settlements, (ii) openings make the structure vulnerable to cracking and (iii) floor slabs stiffen and strengthen the building and prevent the formation of damage in the upper floors, leading to a concentration of damage at the ground storey.

There is a myriad amount of substandard reinforced concrete (RC) buildings in developing countries that do not comply with the requirements and instructions of the current building design codes. In particular, columns in these substandard buildings demonstrate unsatisfactory and undesired behavior against lateral loads, mainly due to low concrete compressive strength and poor reinforcement detailing. The problem is exacerbated when the axial load ratio (ratio of applied axial load to the axial load capacity) and/or the shear ratio (ratio of shear force corresponding to moment capacity (Ve) to the shear capacity (Vr)) is/are high, leading to brittle failure modes. In this study, three full-scale substandard RC columns subjected to high axial load ratio of 0.75 were tested under constant axial load combined with reversed cyclic lateral displacements. Shear ratio (Ve/Vr) of the substandard columns were 0.75 and 0.82 according to ACI 318-19 (ACI 318 (2019) Building Code Requirements for Structural Concrete. American Concrete Institute, Farmington Hills, MI, USA) and (Turkish Building Earthquake Code (Turkish Building Earthquake Code (TBEC) (2018) Disaster & Emergency Management Authority, Ankara, Turkey), respectively. According to the TBEC (Turkish Building Earthquake Code (TBEC) (2018) Disaster & Emergency Management Authority, Ankara, Turkey), columns had a high Ve/(fctmbd) ratio of 1.12, where, fctm, b, and d are the direct tensile strength of concrete, width of the cross-section, and effective depth of the section. The ratio of transverse reinforcement to minimum required transverse reinforcement according to the ACI 318-19 (ACI 318 (2019) Building Code Requirements for Structural Concrete. American Concrete Institute, Farmington Hills, MI, USA) and TBEC (Turkish Building Earthquake Code (TBEC) (2018) Disaster & Emergency Management Authority, Ankara, Turkey) was 0.19 and 0.77, respectively. Two of the columns were retrofitted with an innovative, cost-effective, and easily-applicable strengthening method, through external jacketing with sprayed glass fiber reinforced mortar (GFRM) of different characteristics. The remaining column was tested as the reference specimen to evaluate the efficiency of the strengthening method. The test results demonstrated the extremely poor performance of the reference substandard column as well as the remarkable lateral load capacity and ductility improvement provided by the adopted novel strengthening approach.

Civil Engineering / İnşaat Mühendisliği

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