Enhancing Performance of Infill Masonry With Skin reinforcement Subjected To Cyclic Load

Masonry infill has been widely used as building material due to its cost effectiveness and availability.  The failure of these masonry infill walls during the past earthquakes have underscored the importance of ensuring the safety of the infill walls when it is subjected to lateral loads. In-plane and out of plane failures have been observed in many reinforced concrete framed building with masonry infill. To prevent the failure of the infill walls researchers have worked on various confinement techniques like, textile reinforced mortar, ferro cement, and diagonal bracings using fiberglass reinforced panels (FRP) etc. In this paper chicken mesh were used as a confinement technique and the experimental investigation is presented for enhancing the in-plane properties of masonry infill walls like diagonal tension and shear thereby improving the in-plane strength of masonry infill wall. For studying the lateral load capacity of the infill wall two specimens are cast namely, i) infill wall without mesh (B2), ii) infill wall with mesh (B3). Single bay, single floor 1:3 scaled down reinforced cement concrete (RCC) frames designed as per codal provisions are cast with scaled down bricks for construction of infill walls and because of  incorporation of skin reinforcement for infill walls the ductility, energy dissipation, ultimate loads are improved considerably and reduced the displacements.