Study of experimental behaviour of seismically retrofitted earthen structures

The details of shake table testing of a seismically retrofitted adobe model have been described in this paper. The retrofitting of the model was carried out using bamboos and steel wire mesh in the vertical and horizontal directions, respectively. The acceleration time history of the 1995 Kobe earthquake was used to apply dynamic forces on the model. Different levels of this ground motion were employed which were scaled appropriately. The damage to the structure was limited to minor hairline cracks until peak ground acceleration (PGA) of 0.790 g (in prototype domain). The perforated in-plane (IP) wall was the most severely damaged wall whereas the out-of-plane (OOP) walls suffered least damage. The displacements of the perforated IP and OOP walls were similar which was a result of strong box action developed by the tested model due to the applied retrofit. The behaviour of the perforated IP wall became non-symmetrical at higher levels of applied PGA whereas the OOP wall showed nearly symmetrical behaviour in the positive and negative directions of loading until the end of testing.