Avaliação comparativa da influência do revestimento simples e armado no comportamento compressivo de prismas e paredinhas de blocos cerâmicos de vedação

Abstract

In Brazil, one can find thousands of four storey masonry buildings made with clay units. Some of these building collapsed causing human deaths. After these accidents, several restrictions were imposed for the use of this building technique and now one can not use non-structural bricks in such buildings. Moreover, there are a large number of existing buildings that demand retrofit works to ensure adequate security to the owners. The present work resulted from an experimental program that studied the behavior of prisms made with two and three clay bricks with and without the addition of reinforced mortar. Additionally, it was also considered the link between the layers of the reinforced mortar through the installation of steel connectors. The prisms were subjected to compressive loading and their strains were measured on each side of the specimen using a displacement measure device. The tests were performed in a servo-controlled machine in order to obtain information about the behavior of the prisms before and after the peak load. The results were compared with a previous study in the same load conditions using the same bricks and mortar in small walls specimens which showed a good correlation