RESILIENCE-BASED BLAST DESIGN OF REINFORCED CONCRETE MASONRY SYSTEMS

Abstract

The use of fully grouted reinforced masonry shear walls (RMSWs) has been growing in several areas around the world owing to their relative ease of construction and their in-plane ductile behavior. However, RMSWs possess low out-of-plane ductility which amplifies the vulnerability of such components under blast loading. Furthermore, the long time and high costs of recovery following devastating (deliberate or accidental) explosions have created a need for resilience-based design for risk mitigation, especially considering the different sources of associated uncertainty. As such, this study aims to lay out the foundations of a probabilistic resilience–based blast analysis and design framework. The framework should have the capability of quantifying the overall building post-blast functionality in order to estimate its recovery cost and time, and thus the building resilience following such a demand. The proposed framework will be specifically applied for RMSW buildings incurring blast loads through a profound investigation for the behavior of rectangular RMSWs as being a primary structural element in reinforced masonry buildings. The investigation will subsume an experimental and analytical evaluation for the performance of load-bearing RMSWs with different in-plane ductility levels subjected to out-of-plane quasi-static loading. This will be followed by a numerical investigation of RMSWs to conclude the blast probabilistic performance of RMSWs that can be applied within the proposed probabilistic resilience-based blast framework. The work in this dissertation presents a key step towards adopting resilience based analysis and design in future editions of blast-resistant construction standards and provides the decisionmakers with a complete insight into post-blast building functionality and its recovery.