Shear strengthening of un-reinforced concrete masonry walls with fabric-reinforced-cementitious-matrix

•The effectiveness of FRCM composite for strengthening of masonry walls was investigated.•A total of nine concrete masonry wall panels, 1.2 m × 1.2 m in size, were tested under diagonal compression.•FRCM and FRP strengthened walls were compared after normalizing the data.•The experimental results were also compared with analytical model predictions.

In this paper, the in-plane behavior of un-reinforced concrete masonry walls externally strengthened with a fabric-reinforced cementitious matrix (FRCM) system is investigated. The experimental program consists of testing nine un-reinforced concrete masonry walls strengthened on both sides with two different FRCM schemes (one and four reinforcement fabrics). The analytical model as per ACI 549-13 is used to predict the shear capacity of the strengthened walls. The effects of design limitations in the approach proposed by ACI 549-13 are also discussed. Finally, experimental data from other research programs using fiber-reinforced polymer (FRP) composites are presented to demonstrate that when normalized shear capacity is related to a calibrated reinforcement ratio, the two overlay strengthening technologies match well.