In situ determination of the mechanical performance of the steel rods anchored on an existing masonry building wall

In order to strengthen masonry building walls against horizontal earthquake loads, steel plates or in situ reinforced concrete layers need to be attached to one or both surfaces of the walls. Because the stiffness of the wall and the stiffness of the strengthening element will be different against earthquake loads, the elastic connectors are needed to be attached to the strengthening wall to comply with an existing wall. These connectors must have sufficient and well-known strength, flexibility, spacing, diameter, and depth to resist shear and pull-out forces that will occur between the wall and the strengthening element. And it is of great importance to determine the partially interacted pull-out and direct shear performances of the widely known flexible and commonly used steel rod connectors depending on the diameter and embedment depth in strengthening analysis. In this study, since the partially interacted pull-out test on chemically anchored steel rods has shown more realistic failure in comparison to the fully interacted pull-out test and both the partially interacted pull-out test and the shear test are quite difficult and time-consuming in comparison to the fully interacted pull-out test, the steel rods were anchored on an existing a five stories masonry building constructed using clay block bricks, mortar and plaster in Turkey and then three different types of tests were conducted on steel rods to determine the relation between the fully and partially interacted pull out performances and also between fully interacted pull out and shear performances. Very significant linear equations were obtained for the shear performance and partially interacted pull-out performance of the anchor rods in accordance with the fully interacted pull-out performance of the steel rod connectors for different embedment depth and hole.