ABSTRACT
The paper reports the first results from seismic tests on shake table on a full scale reinforced concrete (RC) frame building with modified orthoblock brick wall infills, within INMASPOL SERA Horizon 2020 project. The building received innovative protection using polyurethane resin flexible joints (PUFJ) at the frame-infill interface, in different schemes. Further, PUs were used for bonding of glass fiber grids to the weak masonry substrate to form Fiber Reinforced PU (FRPU) as an emergency repair intervention. The test results showed enhancement in the in-plane and out-of-plane infill performance under seismic excitations. The results confirmed remarkable delay of significant orthoblock infill damages at very high RC frame inter-storey drifts as a consequence of the use of PUFJ. Further, the PUFJ protection enabled the repair of the infill even after very high inter-storey drift of the structure up to 3.7%. The applied glass FRPU system efficiently protected the damaged orthoblock infills against collapse under out-of-plane excitation while they restored large part of their in-plane stiffness.
