Enhancing shear capacity of masonry wallet using PP-band and steel wire mesh

Past earthquakes witnessed the poor performance of unreinforced masonry (URM) structures resulting into huge economic loss and large number of casualties. In this context, the present paper is aimed to investigate the shear behaviour of a series of masonry wallets (unretrofitted and retrofitted) under diagonal compressive loading. To improve the wallet behaviour in shear, polypropylene band (PP-band) and steel wire mesh (WM) are used as retrofitting material. Both faces of wall are wrapped to get full tightening effect during loading. Bricks having standard size and half scale size are used to construct the full scale wallet and small scale wallet, respectively. It has been observed that retrofitted wall exhibits significant improvement in terms of load carrying capacity, displacement ability. Failure mode for both unreinforced masonry (URM) and strengthened specimens are reported and shear strength is computed using analytical formulations. It was observed that both the strengthening materials not only increase the load carrying capacity but also helps in changing the failure mode from brittle to ductile in some extent. From the study, it may be concluded that use of PP band and steel wire mesh are effective in improving the shear behaviour of masonry structures for both the types of wallets.