Experimental Study On Structural And Seismic Behavior Of Composite Concrete Block Masonry Walls

In the construction, the national policy of "Protecting land source and farm" must be executed and the urgent requirement of energy saving have to be met as well. Composite concrete small hollow blocks with the advantages of both energy saving and land source protecting are to be adopted widely soon. The experimental study on the structural and seisemic behavior of masonry walls made of this type blocks is presented in the paper.This type of blocks has many excellent properties such as: energy insulating, land saving, environment p rotecting, easy t o b e c onstructed, e tc. Walls c onstructed w ith this type of blocks have as good energy abilities as cavity wall filled with insulation while the construction process is much easier. In our nation, information and studies on the performance of this new type of blocks are scarce and the code is also completely blank about this, which delays and limits the utility of it. This paper presents a series of experimental and theoretical studies, some conclusions are drawn and some suggestions are given also, which has practical engineering meanings.The main study contents:Compression experiments are made to test the compression strength of both single blocks and standard masonry specimens. According to the test results and the code, the compression strengths of the walls are calculated. Then 4 wall samples with different structural methods are tested on the compression strength, the comparison between test results and the calculated values is made to determine an appropriate formula to calculate the compression strength of the walls, the influences of different structural methods on walls' behavior are also discussed.Experiment is taken to draw the shear strength of composite concrete small hollow block masonry. Then a comparison between the experiment results and the shear strength formula given by the code is made to suggest an appropriate method to determine the shear strength of the blocks. And the experimental shear strength is adopted in the later calculation.Nonlinear analysis on wall models simulating practical walls under compression load and shear is made with FEA program Ansys, which helps to design and analysis the low cyclic experiment.2 full-size wall models are tested under both constant vertical load and horizontal low cyclic load to investigate the lateral resistance, ductility, energy-dissipation,stiffness degradation, hysteresis curves, and failure mechanisms.Through the experimental study and theoretical analysis, the behavior of the composite concrete small hollow block masonry walls under compression, shear and seismic loads are concluded.At the same time, some structural suggestions and designing suggestions are presented based on the experiment study and theoretical analysis in this paper to offer basic references for the use of composite blocks.