Study On Strengthening And Seismic Performance Of Rowlock Cavity Wall Buildings

According to the existing results, large number of rowlock cavity wall buildings still exist in the south of China. Whether these buildings can reach goals of seismic design code or not? Is it necessary to reinforce them? Further research should be well developed. In this paper, a large deal of literature on the construction technology of rowlock cavity wall and seismic reinforcement methods are reviewed. Therefore, two full-scale single layers rowlock cavity wall buildings with two rooms are designed. One is an ordinary building without reinforcement, another with steel-sticked with anchorage-tie reinforcement. Seismic tests of them are carried to study the effect of reinforcement and evaluate the anti-seismic performance of them.Dynamic performance tests are carried out to contrast natural frequencies, damping ratios and mode shapes between the two models with hammering method.The pseudo-dynamic tests are used to study seismic response of acceleration, restoring force, especially displacement of doors, windows, floors and baseplate. From the results, the ordinary building without reinforcement can withstand 6 degree rarely met earthquake, with high-quality construction technology. Stiffness of building with steel-sticked with anchorage-tie reinforcement has a certain increase, though not substantially, while the seismic response has a decreasing trend.In order to study models’anti-seismic performance more deeply, quasi-static tests are carried out to obtain the hysteretic cures, maximum resistance and ultimate displacement. Results show that, ductility of rowlock cavity wall building after steel-sticked with anchorage-tie has been greatly improved. Compared with the ordinary building, the reinforcement model’s maximum resistance increases by more than half, and ultimate displacement increases by more than three times.