SESIMIC BEHAVIOUR OF BRICK AND HOLLOW BLOCK MASONRY WALLS WITH FIBRE COMPOSITES

In India, 60% of land is vulnerable to seismic excitation. In the past Bhuj Earthquake, it was learned that most of the collapse has been happened in the non-engineered constructions. They include both R.C.C and Masonry buildings. Recent research works in Earthquake resistant design focus on the energy absorption in critical locations of the structure.So here an attempt has been made to enhance the energy absorption capacity of the different masonry walls such as Brick masonry and Hollow block masonry using Nylon fibre composites of 1% volume fraction.The aim of the project is to study the seismic behavior of hollow block and brick masonry wall with and without fibre reinforcement. Energy absorption capacity parameter is compared by drawing the load –deflection curves. This project consists of two stages. One is finite element analysis using commercial software ANSYS 10. PLANE 42 elements have been chosen for modeling the brick masonry. One of the input parameters of ANSYS is Young’s Modulus. It has been obtained from the test results of Brick pillars under compressive loading. The remaining parameter namely Poisson’s ratio has been assumed as 0.25 for all the models. Finally both the finite element and experimental analysis results have been compared.