Masonry buildings strengthened with textile-fiber composite (TRC) layers and fiber-reinforced cementitious (FRC) layers

Abstract

In June 2015, the authors published a paper titled “Brief Report of Shaking Table Test on Masonry Building Strengthened with Ferrocement Layers” [1]. The authors suggested in that paper to replace the traditional way of constructing masonry houses using the so called practical columns and beams (herein after called traditional masonry houses) with bandaging using ferrocement layers on both sides of the walls as skin facings and brick wall as core. Since then, many masonry houses bandaged with ferrocement layers are built in Indonesia. Apart from constructing new earthquake resistant houses, ferrocement bandaging is also used for retrofitting existing as well as damaged houses after earthquakes. In the past decades, continuous fiber mesh was introduced to replace the steel wire mesh in a cementitious matrix. Since the early 2000, textile-based composites were used in the field of strengthening and seismic retrofitting of masonry as well as concrete structures. Originally these new “textile fiber composite” materials are called “Textile Reinforced Concrete” (TRC) in Europe. However, in the USA, the term used is “Fiber Reinforced Cementitious Matrix systems” (FRCM). Extensive research on FRCM / TRC were conducted. A wide variety of publications on the subject matter are now available worldwide. Apart from TRC, many technical studies are published addressing fiber reinforced cement and concrete composite. The term “Fiber Reinforced Cementitious” (FRC) is used and defined as concrete and/or cementitious matrix with suitable discontinuous fibers added to it for the purposes of achieving a desired level of performance in a particular property, such as modulus elasticity, tensile strength, and ductility [2]. Lately, the use of discontinuous fibers as reinforcement for concrete and cementitious matrix FRC are introduced by many practitioners and civil engineers. Adding fibers in concrete / cementitious matrix mixer simply like adding sand or admixtures, to create a homogenous, isotropic, strong, tough, durable, and moldable structural materials [2]. In this paper the authors used the terms of TRC and FRC as defined by Naaman [2, 3], namely TRC for fiber-cement with fiber-mesh and FRC for fiber-cement with discontinuous fiber. This paper provides a simplified global analysis of the overall structure strengthened with FRCM / TRC as well as strengthened with FRC.