Occupant friendly seismic retrofit by concrete plates

An innovative occupant friendly retrofitting technique has been developed for reinforced concrete (RC) building structures with hollow brick infill walls used as partition walls which constitute the major portion of the existing building stock in Turkey. The idea is to convert the existing hollow brick infill wall into a load carrying system acting as a cast-in-place RC wall by reinforcing it with relatively thin concrete plates bonded to the mortar coated infill wall by use of tile adhesive and fixed by I broken vertical bar 6 (6 mm diameter) bolts. Test parameters were the shape and thickness of the plates, presence of reinforcement in plates, number and arrangement of I broken vertical bar 6 bolts. It was observed that lateral strength, stiffness, energy dissipation capacity, and ductility of the strengthened infill walls were improved and behaviour was enhanced by the proposed technique. Plates with two different basic shapes were used to strengthen the test specimens.