EFFECT OF APPLICATION ISSUES IN MASONRY CONFINEMENT WITH COMPOSITES

The aim of this research is to deepen knowledge on mechanical behaviour of columns confined by means of post-installed fibre reinforced composites. The reason for this is the experimental evidence of very scattered results in terms of confined strength and global behaviour of columns strengthened with different amounts of fibres. Not always higher fibre amounts correspond to higher global performances. It is expected that local effect of defects impacts on the global response of the confinement on these columns, as it was already seen in other strengthening applications. To consider the great variability of composite materials, it was necessary to adopt a confinement model able to include the potential geometric defects, typical of real manual applications, in the evaluation of confinement. At the basis of this model there is an incremental algorithm, whose input is the imposed transversal strain, and whose output are all the curves that identify the behaviour of the confinement system. Subsequently, attention was focused on carrying out the parametric analysis, carried out by varying the key parameters of the confinement system and evaluating the results.