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Masonry buildings built in Italy in the 60 s and 70 s of the last century frequently require energy and seismic renovation. To this end, the use of a retrofitting technique based on a multilayer coating may be applied on the building façades in order to improve its seismic and energy performances, leading to the partial or total fulfilment of structural and energy code provisions. The coating consists of a layer of Steel Fiber Reinforced Mortar combined with thermal insulation materials to get a composite package applied on the building façade. After a brief description of the proposed technique, the paper reports the results of seismic and thermal analyses carried out to prove the structural and energy performance of the retrofitting intervention.

Thin layers of mortar reinforced with steel fibers can be applied on one or both sides of bearing walls as an effective seismic strengthening of existing masonry buildings. To assess the effectiveness of this technique, an experimental study on masonry sub-assemblages was carried out at the University of Brescia. This paper summarizes and discusses the main results of the investigation, which included mechanical characterization tests on masonry and its components as well as on the Steel Fiber Reinforced Mortar (SFRM) used to retrofit the masonry samples. Uniaxial and diagonal compression tests were carried out on both unstrengthened wallets and masonry samples retrofitted with 25 mm thick SFRM coating. Both single-sided and double-sided retrofitting configurations for application on wall surfaces were considered. The results highlighted the ability of the technique to improve the compressive and the shear behavior of masonry, even in case of single-sided strengthening. Moreover, no premature debonding of coating was observed. Lastly, the manuscript presents the results of a numerical investigation that was performed both to simulate the diagonal compression tests described in the first part of the paper and to predict the response of panels with different strengthening configurations.

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