Experimental Research on Seismic Behavior of Reinforced N-Block Masonry Shear Wall

In this paper tests were carried out on four reinforced N-block masonry shear walls with the same reinforced rate but the different grout rate and method of masonry (built with straight-lint joint and staggered-line joint) under the lateral cyclic load. Through this experimentation the failure pattern, ultimate strength, hysteretic characteristics, and ductility of seismic performance of the wall had been preliminarily investigated. It showed that when comparing to ordinary concrete block masonry shear walls, reinforced N-block masonry shear wall had higher ultimate bearing capacity on diagonal section and normal section; the failure form was similar to reinforced concrete shear wall by scene construction; the ultimate bearing capacity of the walls reduced when the vertical load depressed while the ductility was improved in the contrary way; there was many cracks which was thin and destroyed when it occurred bending damage. In other words, the new walls made out to be improved in strength, stiffness, ductility performance and energy dissipation capacity to normal ones.