| Abstract: |
Brick masonry buildings represent a considerable share of the world building stock, especially in developing countries and in seismically active areas (e.g., South Asia, Mediterranean region or Latin America). Most are nonductile, having been built prior to the inclusion of seismic design provisions in most building codes and displaying poor lateral load resistance; they perform poorly against earthquake damage. Reinforced Concrete (RC) jacketing is among the most popular techniques of retrofitting to improve seismic performance in existing masonry buildings. The proposed empirical paper provides a literature-based data-driven approach characterizing the performance of brick masonry structures retrofitted with Reinforced Concrete (RC) jacketing employing experimental results, numerical simulation using Finite Element Modeling (FEM), and field survey data from 120 retrofitting buildings located in Zone III, IV, and V. Five important performance parameters, namely lateral load capacity, ductility ratio, stiffness degradation, energy dissipation capacity and inter-storey drift were evaluated in the systematic manner before and after strengthening. The analysis shows that RC jacketing improves lateral load capacity by an average of 215%, increases ductility ratios from 1.2 to above 4.8, decreases inter-storey drift as much as -68% and increases cumulative energy dissipation around +340%. Strong jacket thickness-performance improvement indices were shown via statistical regression model of data-R² = 0.87. Moreover, a comparison of these empirical trends with past experimental studies also corroborates these findings. The results provide quantitative benchmarks for practicing engineers and support development of evidence-based seismic retrofit design guidelines for unreinforced masonry buildings. |
