Innovative materials and technologies have been developed to limit the effects of earthquakes on structures, and the use of composite materials has been shown to be effective in existing buildings. In view of this background, experimental tests can provide a contribution to the interpretation of available strengthening interventions. The results of experiments with an innovative strengthening system are presented herein. The strengthening technique used is based on a textile-reinforced mortar (TRM) system coupled with traditional strengthening approaches, and was applied to a type of full-scale masonry vault that is typically found in the roofs of religious buildings. The experiments consisted of several shaking table tests, both before and after the application of the strengthening system. The seismic behavior of the vault after strengthening was significantly improved. The instrumental response of the vault started to change before the initial visible damage, which only occurred when the peak ground acceleration (PGA) was almost doubled. The seismic capacity of the unreinforced vault was more than doubled when the strengthening was applied, with the vulnerability moving from the curved element to the masonry abutments. As a consequence, additional interventions should focus on lateral abutments. There was no debonding between the TRM and the masonry substrate, and the strengthening strategy (combination of innovative and traditional approaches) was effective in preventing the failure of the vault
Recent calamitous events have shown the fragility of the existing masonry buildings. Many of them are heritage structures, such as churches and monumental buildings. Therefore, optimized strengthening strategies are necessary. Experimental studies performed on masonry elements strengthened with composite systems have shown the performance of these materials. However, further development is necessary to optimize the intervention strategies. In fact, due to the lack of general validity models, the design is usually based on prescriptive approaches according to manufacturers’ broad instructions, often producing systems with low efficiency and overestimations of the amount of reinforcement. In this paper a generalized approach is proposed to assess the flexural behavior of masonry sections strengthened with composites. The proposed theory has allowed performance of a sensitivity analysis assessing the impact both of the mechanical parameters of masonry and of the strengthening system. In particular, the impact of several constitutive relationships of composites (linear, bilinear, or trilinear) have been evaluated in terms of ultimate behavior of the strengthened masonry. For strengthening systems more compatible with the masonry substrate, the form of the stress–strain relationship becomes a key aspect. For such cases, the modeling of the reinforcement plays a fundamental role and the form of the relationship is strongly correlated to the type of reinforcement selected, e.g., organic versus inorganic matrix.
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