Enhancing the In-Plane Behavior of a Hybrid Timber Frame-Mud and Stone Infill Wall Using PP Band Mesh on One Side

Yinlan Shen; Xingchen Yan; Hui Liu; Guofang Wu; Wei He

doi:10.3390/polym14040773

Enhancing the In-Plane Behavior of a Hybrid Timber Frame-Mud and Stone Infill Wall Using PP Band Mesh on One Side

Polymers (Basel). 2022 Feb 16;14(4):773. doi: 10.3390/polym14040773.

Authors

Yinlan Shen^{1

2}, Xingchen Yan^{1

2}, Hui Liu³, Guofang Wu⁴, Wei He⁵

Affiliations

¹ Key Laboratory of Urban Security and Disaster Engineering of Ministry of Education, Beijing University of Technology, Beijing 100124, China.
² Beijing Key Laboratory of Earthquake Engineering and Structural Retrofit, Beijing University of Technology, Beijing 100124, China.
³ Urban Renewal Research Office, Beijing Urban Construction Research Center, Beijing 101160, China.
⁴ Research Institute of Wood Industry, Chinese Academy of Forestry, Beijing 100091, China.
⁵ School of Civil and Transportation Engineering, Beijing University of Civil Engineering and Architecture, Beijing 100044, China.

Abstract

Traditional village dwellings in China consisting of timber frames with mud and stone infill walls represent an important part of cultural heritage and civilization. Due to the lack of an effective link between the wood frame and the infill and the poor cohesiveness of clay, the masonry infill can collapse during an earthquake, whereas the wood frame suffers minimal damage. In this study, current retrofitting techniques for village buildings were investigated and discussed. A method using polypropylene (PP) band mesh and cement mortar to retrofit the timber frame with a mud and stone infill was proposed and the connection construction details were designed. In-plane static cyclic tests were conducted on two full-scale wood-stone hybrid walls reinforced on one side with different grid sizes of the PP band mesh. The failure behaviors of the reinforced and non-reinforced sides of the specimens were compared, and the failure mechanics and seismic capacity of the two specimens, i.e., the strength, stiffness, ductility, and energy dissipation, were investigated. The results were also compared with those of a previous frame with stone infill without pebbles and no reinforcement. The study indicated that the retrofitting method strengthened the integrity and lateral resistance of the hybrid structure and prevented the collapse of the stone infill of the reinforced surface in a plane earthquake. The grid size of the PP band mesh substantially affected the lateral performance of the reinforced specimens. The hybrid wall with the narrow PP band mesh grid (150 mm × 150 mm) had a higher lateral stiffness (79%) and lateral capacity (50%) than the wall with the wide grid (250 mm × 250 mm). However, the narrow PP band mesh resulted in a lower ductility of the wall than the wide PP band mesh. The involvement of pebbles in the stone infill led to collapses sooner and a weaker lateral resistance than in the structure without pebble infill.

Keywords: mud and stone infill; polypropylene band meshes; seismic reinforcement; timber frames; traditional village dwellings.

Abstract

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