Experimental investigation of the shear strength of hollow brick unreinforced masonry walls retrofitted with TRM system

The study is part of an experimental program on full-scale Un-Reinforced Masonry (URM) wall panels strengthened with Textile reinforced mortars (TRM). Eight brick walls (two with and five without central opening), were tested under the diagonal tension (shear) test method in order to investigate the strengthening system effectiveness on the in-plane behaviour of the walls. All the URM panels consist of the innovative components, named "Orthoblock K300 bricks" with vertical holes and a thin layer mortar. Both of them have great capacity and easy application and can be constructed much more rapidly than the traditional bricks and mortars, increasing productivity, as well as the compressive strength of the masonry walls. Several parameters pertaining to the in-plane shear behaviour of the retrofitted panels were investigated, including shear capacity, failure modes, the number of layers of the external TRM jacket, and the existence of the central opening of the wall. For both the control and retrofitted panels, the experimental shear capacity and failure mode were compared with the predictions of existing prediction models (ACI 2013, TA 2000, Triantafillou 1998, Triantafillou 2016, CNR 2018, CNR 2013, Eurocode 6, Eurocode 8, Thomoglou et al. 2020). The experimental work allowed an evaluation of the shear performance in the case of the bidirectional textile (TRM) system applied on the URM walls. The results have shown that some analytical models present a better accuracy in predicting the shear resistance of all the strengthened masonry walls with TRM systems which can be used in design guidelines for reliable predictions.