Tuff Masonry Walls Strengthened With a New Kind of CFRP Sheet: Experimental Tests and Analysis

A lot of tuff masonry buildings have been built in the past centuries in Italy and in southern Europe; such
buildings are generally dimensioned and detailed for vertical loads; for this reason strengthening upgrade
is generally required for horizontal actions.
In the last years composite materials have been utilised for such a purpose instead of more traditional
techniques consisting, for example, in casting two thin r.c. plates at both the faces of the masonry wall
obtaining a sandwich structure.
The present paper deals with experimental tests carried out on tuff masonry walls strengthened with an
innovative composite material consisting in a low-density bidirectional carbon-fiber tissue that can be
applied to the masonry wall by means of a special cement-based mortar. A series of masonry walls have
been tested under diagonal compression at the Laboratory of Structures of the University of Salerno
(Italy), according to the ASTM E519/02 standard. Both unreinforced and reinforced walls have been
considered in order to quantify the influence of such a new strengthening technique with respect to the
bare masonry behaviour in terms of strength and ductility.