EXPERIMENTAL STUDY ON MASONRY BUILDING STRENGTHENED WITH FERROCEMENT LAYERS

Abstract

In the last ten years, Indonesia has suffered from moderate to severe building damages due to
big earthquakes such as Yogyakarta and West Sumatra earthquakes in 2006 and 2009, respectively. Most of
the damages are non-engineered buildings such as residential houses and schools, which are unreinforced
masonry (URM) buildings made of brick without any reinforcements. These URM constructions are using a
half clay thick brick method which is not compatible with the standards. In order to strengthen these URM
buildings, a retrofitting method using ferrocement layers has been developed. An experimental study on
URM building strengthened by ferrocement layers was conducted. Two specimens of a quarter scale house
building models consisted of four walls with size 90cm x 110cm were constructed. The first model (M1) is
the original unreinforced masonry structure with mortar plaster, and the second (M2) is the same masonry
structure strengthened by providing full ferrocement layers on both sides of the walls which are acting as
sandwich structures. Both specimens were tested by using a shaking table (304x190) cm2 with input motions
up to 1g. The test results show that the ferrocement layers can significantly improve the performance of the
URM building model and effective in preventing the collapse of masonry walls when it is shaken by
earthquakes. It is concluded that this retrofitting model is applicable to retrofit the URM houses in seismic
regions.