Australia-New Zealand research into seismic retrofit of masonry structures using FRP strips – A progress report

Abstract

This paper presents the progress to-date under the large collaborative research project between the Universities of Adelaide and Newcastle in Australia and the University of Auckland in New Zealand. The project seeks to develop new, cost-effective and architecturally unobtrusive retrofit techniques for unreinforced masonry buildings. The work on this project has consisted of research into the in-plane response of near-surface-mounted FRP strip reinforced walls (Univ of Newcastle), out-of-plane flexural response of NSM FRP reinforced walls (Univ of Adelaide) and field tests on NSM FRP retrofit walls in real buildings across New Zealand (Univ of Auckland) to demonstrate the effectiveness of the new technique and, importantly, to provide data from retrofit walls in real buildings to validate the analytical and numerical models being developed by researchers at all three universities. The lead organisation for each area has been listed above. However, additional tests across all the areas have also been conducted at each institution to provide cross-checks and validate the results from experiments at each university.