Published Paper Details:

Past earthquakes witnessed the poor performance of unreinforced masonry walls (URM) structures resulting into huge economic loss and large number of casualties. In this context, the present paper is aimed to investigate the shear behavior of a series of masonry walls under Diagonal compressive loading. To improve the wall behavior in shear, Polypropylene band (PP-band) and fiber glass mesh (FGM) are used as retrofitting material. Both faces of wall are wrapped to get full tightening effect during loading. This paper compares the shear behavior and flexural behavior of the unreinforced masonry walls with fiber glass mesh. The walls are constructed of full scale and half scale sizes. These walls are also compared with shear wall and the results of each particular wall are obtained. It has been observed that retrofitted walls exhibit significant improvement in terms of load carrying capacity and shear behavior. Failure mode of the walls are 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. During the study, it may be concluded that the use of PP band and fiber glass mesh are effective in improving the shear behavior of masonry walls for all types of walls.