• Earthquakes and Structures
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• v.19 no.6
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• pp.459-469
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• 2020

An external prestressed steel-bar truss unit was developed as a new strengthening technology to enhance the seismic performance of an in-plane masonry wall structure while taking advantage of the benefits of a prestressed system. The presented method consists of six steel bars: two prestressed vertical bars to introduce a prestressing force on the masonry wall, two diagonal bars to resist shear deformation, and two horizontal bars to maintain the configuration. To evaluate the effects of this new technique, four full-scale specimens, including a control specimen, were tested under combined loadings that included constant-gravity axial loads and cyclic lateral loads. The experimental results were analyzed in terms of the shear strength, initial stiffness, dissipated energy, and strain history. The efficiency of the external prestressed steel-bar truss unit was validated. In particular, a retrofitted specimen with an axial load level of 0.024 exhibited a more stable post behavior and higher energy dissipation than a control specimen with an observed complete sliding failure. The four vertical bars of the adjacent retrofitting units created a virtual column, and their strain values did not change until they reached the peak shear strength. The shear capacity of the masonry wall structure with external prestressed steel-bar truss units could be predicted using the model suggested by Yang et al.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.83 no.6
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• pp.799-810
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• 2022

This study investigated the effect of the strengthening efficiency of unbonded steel-bar truss system on the out-of-plane behavior of perforated masonry walls. Four full-scale unreinforced masonry (URM) walls with two different planes were prepared using the unbonded steel-bar truss system and a URM walls without strengthening. All masonry walls were tested under constant axial and cyclic lateral loads. The obtained test results indicated that the pinching effect in the out-plane behavior of masonry walls tends to decrease in the in- and out-of-plane strengthened URM walls using the unbonded steel-bar truss system with the higher prestressing force ratio (R_p) of vertical reinforcing bars in the unbonded steel-bar truss system, regardless of the perforated type of the masonry wall. Consequently, the highest maximum shear resistance and cumulative dissipated energy at peak load in the post-peak behavior were observed in the in- and out-plane strengthened URM walls with the highest R_p values, which are 2.7 and 6.0 times higher than those of URM. In particular, the strengthening efficiency of the unbonded steel-bar truss system was primarily attributed to the vertical prestressed steel-bars rather than the diagonal steel-bars, which indicates that the strains in the vertical prestressed steel-bars at the peak load were approximately 1.6 times higher than those in the diagonal steel-bars.