PSI - Issue 44

Gabriele Guerrini et al. / Procedia Structural Integrity 44 (2023) 1877–1884 Gabriele Guerrini et al. / Structural Integrity Procedia 00 (2022) 000 – 000

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Fig. 1 Overview of the timber retrofit system: a) individual pier; b) entire building.

The component tests were followed by two incremental shake-table tests on two identical full-scale masonry buildings, one in bare conditions and one retrofitted with the new timber system, performed at the EUCENTRE laboratories. The building prototypes were about 5.9-m long, 5.6-m wide and 7.8-m high, with a high percentage of openings asymmetrically distributed on the sides longitudinal to the external excitation (Fig. 2a) and no openings on the transverse sides (Fig. 2b). The structural system was characterized by cavity walls, consisting of an internal single wythe, 100-mm-thick loadbearing CS leaf and an external single-wythe, 100-mm-thick clay veneer. 3.1-mm-diameter steel ties provided the connection between the two leaves, which were separated by an air gap of 80 mm. The buildings were highly irregular in plan and elevation and presented a rigid reinforced concrete (RC) slab at the first-floor level and a flexible timber diaphragm at the second-floor and roof levels. The retrofit intervention was applied to the entire building prototype keeping timber member sizes, OSB thickness, nail spacing, and connections univariate with respect to the in-plane quasi-static tests described above.

Fig. 2 Full-scale building specimen: a) ground-floor plan; b) first-floor plan; c) overall photo (arrow indicates the shaking direction). Units of cm.