Seismic Strengthening of Unreinforced Concrete Block Masonry Walls with High Ductile Fiber-Reinforced Concrete (HDC)

Unreinforced concrete block masonry (URM) walls are seismic vulnerable. Thus, this study examined the responses of URM walls strengthened using high ductile fiber-reinforced concrete (HDC) to assess the effectiveness of the proposed retrofitting technique. A reference specimen and five retrofitted specimens were tested based on the cyclic loading program; the strengthening configurations included the HDC strips or layers. The experimental results validated the effectiveness of the retrofitting techniques for enhancing the seismic performance of URM walls. The paper proposed the formulas to calculate the bearing capacity of each specimen corresponding to different failure modes, which is informative for engineering design.