STUDIES ON MASONRY-R.C. COMPOSITES

Abstract

Composite brick masonry may consist -a' brickwork and concrete with or without reinforcing steel. In these composites advantage has been taken of including reinforce-ment conveniently within brickwork, increasing speed of construction, avoidingrAionwork for concrete as in-cavity construction and lowering costs: In addition, the stiffness and overall strength of the masonry also gets improved. In this thesis composite construction of short brick columns with plain and reinforced mortar under axial load as 4 veil as combined axial load and uniaxial bending has been studied. The mortar layer also helps in increasing the resistance to penetration of water. The test results have shown full participation of unreinforced plaster in imparting strength and stiffness to masonry; in the case of reinforced plaster also full strength was developed under eccentric loading but the strength under axial load was slightly lower than the predicted value. Full stiffness was, however, achieved in all cases. Need for defining the precise stress block for masonry has been felt to predict the strength of composite more accu-rately,