Abstract there are many complex considerations when seeking to seismically retrofit unreinforced masonry urm buildings.
Urm building retrofitting with concrete wall.
The damage can occur not only to the building itself but to nearby buildings and poses a major risk to life safety.
Retrofit construction of urm buildings.
Preventing the collapse of the walls particularly load bearing walls is critical in urm buildings.
Shear walls or concrete overlay walls are often installed over the inside face of existing walls and epoxy doweled to the brick.
Or adding a fiber composite layer epoxy embedded fiberglass mesh.
Wall repair and strengthening.
The code requires some 8 000 urm buildings to be retrofitted vacated or demolished.
Strength requirements need to be evaluated and the intrinsic strength of.
Bracing the parapets is a must when evaluating the needed retrofitting of a urm building.
The walls of a concrete tilt up building can weigh between 100 000 and 300 000 pounds.
This entails strengthening the walls through various methods such as adding strongbacks or secondary support members to the wall.
And adding shear elements.
Buildings built of unreinforced masonry urm brick hollow clay tiles stone concrete blocks or adobe are very likely to be damaged in earthquakes because the mortar holding the masonry together may not be strong enough to resist earthquake forces.
An unreinforced masonry building or umb urm building is a type of building where load bearing walls non load bearing walls or other structures such as chimneys are made of brick cinderblock tiles adobe or other masonry material that is not braced by reinforcing material such as rebar in a concrete or cinderblock.
Anchoring walls to diaphragms.
Diaphragm repair and strengthening.
Anchoring walls to diaphragms anchoring systems mechanically connect walls and diaphragms and limit destructive wall deflection.
2 3 wall anchorage.
Earthquake retrofitting services for unreinforced masonry buildings urm unreinforced masonry buildings are especially vulnerable to earthquakes.
Adding shotcrete bonded to the urm wall.
Experience with thousands of urm buildings has identified four major aspects of seismic retrofitting.
All masonry should be reinforced.
A lot of damage to urm buildings can be attributed to parapet failures when a seismic event occurs.
Similar to steel frame schemes the existing brick provides no resistance to seismic forces and the new concrete resists all loads.
Steel plates with headed studs are positioned into the forms prior to pouring the concrete to establish viable connection points that secure the walls to the foundation and the roof trusses to hold them in place.
Th e urm problem in jurisdictions that are now eff ectively enforcing the current building code essentially the latest edition of the international building code the ibc is due to those buildings that were built before recent model code seismic pro.
Developing successful risk reduction programs states more than any other kind of construction this type of building can be singled out as being seismically vulnerable.
Concrete or shotcrete shear walls are a commonly used seismic retrofit technique.