FINITE ELEMENT MODELLING OF A FIXED SANDCRETE MASONRY WALL UNDER BLAST LOADING

📄 Project Abstract

Terrorism, with explosions both in and outside buildings, has become a significant problem in the world. There are already several houses of unreinforced masonry, some of which are historical. But under blast loading they do not function well. Retrofitting methods have been developed to protect masonry buildings. Some research work has been carried out in recent years to study the impact of retrofitted URM walls; these experiments require usually significant time and funds. Also, with the attacks being carried out by Boko Haram in Nigeria, a study is needed to check the behaviour of sandcrete masonry under blast loading as it is widely used in Nigeria. Unreinforced masonry walls are vulnerable to collapse when they are subjected to explosives of out-of-plane and in-plane loads, as masonry houses were historically designed with little to no consideration to the impact of explosive loads [1]. Because of the lack of strengthening, many of these structures mostly fail in out-of-plane bendi...