Abstract:

In earthquake-prone regions, there has been a notable focus on employing modern and efficient techniques to enhance the durability of unreinforced masonry walls (URM) in recent years. Among these approaches, the utilization of Fiber Reinforced Polymer (FRP) for strengthening has particularly gained recognition. In this paper, a novel empirical model is presented, employing nonlinear regression analysis, to forecast the shear contribution of FRP strips. URM walls with three configurations of the FRP strips have been considered: one is horizontal FRP strips, the second is vertical FRP strips, and the other is FRP grid strips. The proposed model is developed by using the input parameters determined by considering fourteen different experimental specimens available in the literature, and also considers the influence of reinforcement ratio (ρ0), which was not taken into account in previously suggested models. The FRP strips shear contribution of was competed with the ACI 440.7R-10 model and experimental results. The essential step in any analytical model is evaluating the developed model's accuracy by comparing it with the experimental data and model. This evaluation was performed using the coefficient of determination (R2). The results indicated that the suggested model accurately forecasts the shear contribution of FRP strips and is better aligned with experimental results compared to the ACI 440.7R-10 model.

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