Experimental Investigation of Unreinforced and Reinforced Masonry Slab
Unreinforced Brick masonry is a non-homogeneous material made of bricks as the building units and the mortar as the interface material. Brick masonry has a high compressive strength under vertical loads but has a low tensile strength against bending. Reinforced brick masonry show greater resistance against shear and bending. Brick masonry slab have good appearance, fire resistance capacity, thermal and acoustics performance, free from corrosion of reinforcement etc. Two types of masonry slab with herring bone bond pattern were fabricated using wire mesh and minimum reinforcement in addition to that one traditional RCC slab was also fabricated using minimum reinforcement. The masonry slabs failed due to brick failure without any advance warning. The crack pattern of masonry slabs using wire mesh and minimum reinforcement were flexure-tension and web-shear respectively. The crack pattern of RCC slab was flexure-shear. The maximum flexural stress carried by RCC slab, masonry slabs with wire mesh, with minimum reinforcement were 488 psi, 194 psi and 387 psi respectively where the maximum deflections were 0.157 inch (3.98 mm), 0.083 inch (2.1 mm) and 0.05 inch(1.28 mm), respectively. Reduction of cost of masonry slabs using wire mesh and minimum reinforcement from RCC slab are 24.14% and 2.85% respectively.
