Investigating seismic and energy retrofitting by implementing innovative materials and techniques for masonry buildings

Unreinforced masonry buildings bear traces of previous civilisations' cultural and architectural monuments. They are considered a significant danger to humans because they have been proven to fail when exposed to earthquakes. In addition, there is a rising necessity to reduce our carbon footprint and thermal energy consumption. So, the behaviour of masonry walls retrofitted with textile-reinforced mortar (TRM) and thermal insulation to combine seismic and energy retrofitting has been investigated. For this purposes, analytical work has been implemented using two equations developed by authors in the literature to estimate the out-of-plane maximum resisting bending moment of retrofitted masonry walls. The accuracy of the adopted equations has been evaluated by comparison of the results of equations with corresponding experimental results from a database comprising 108 TRM-strengthened walls collected from the literature. In addition, the development of finite element (FE) model has been investigated for seismic and energy retrofitting of masonry walls through the application of the TRM systems and thermal insulation panel (TIP). In addition, the development of a numerical method has been investigated through the application of the TRM systems and thermal insulation panel (TIP) for seismic and energy retrofitting for masonry walls by the finite element (FE) method. Five parameters have been investigated through FE analysis: unreinforced masonry wall as control specimen; only TRM composite has been bonded to both sides of the wall without TIP; both TRM and TIP have been bonded to both sides of the wall; only TIP has been implemented to both sides of the wall without TRM systems; both of TRM and TIP have been applied to only one side of the wall. The analytical results indicate that the equation developed in the literature to predict the capacity of FRP-retrofitted URM walls provides acceptable results to predict the capacity of TRM-retrofitted URM walls. The results of the FE method agree with the results of the previous studies. Keywords: Masonry buildings, Seismic retrofitting, Energy retrofitting, Textile-reinforced mortar (TRM), Flexural capacity, Thermal insulation panel, Finite element analysis.