Experimental Study of Compressed Ceramic Hollow Brick Masonry Structures Strengthened with GFRP Meshes

The article presents the results of the experimental study of masonry columns which have been strengthened after high-level axial compression loading with glass fiber reinforced polymer composites. Preliminary damaged ceramic hollow-brick middle-scale models were continuously wrapped with Glass FRP meshes in order to the testing program. The target point of this early exploration is to define the efficiency of the described method of strengthening for considerably affected models after their decompression. The “stress-strain” curves have been compared for confined and unconfined specimens. Reported results demonstrated raised load-bearing and ductility values for confined columns. In addition, the failure mode for wrapping has been noted and described. Control samples have shown brittle failure in contrast to strengthened samples’ plain collapse. Any atypical failure mode (due to sharp ceramic broken pieces) has not been observed. The paper also provides conclusions in terms of obtained experimental results and addresses numerical investigations to further research.