2.4.

2 Reinforced Masonry

Although all ancient masonry was essentially unreinforced masonry, metal ties were
sometimes used to anchor one masonry unit to another. An early instance of the
systematic use of wrought iron bars embedded in stone masonry as armature was in the
Church of St. Genevieve in Paris built around 1770. One a of the first know uses of iron
reinforcement in brick masonry was in two shafts associated with the Black wall Tunnel
under the Thames Rives in 1825. However, reinforced masonry, in a modern sense, was
not commonly used in buildings until about a century later, when it was mainly used in the
seismically active areas of India, Japan, and the United States. Reinforced masonry is
widely used today in many countries.

During the 1933 Long Beach, California, earthquake, many unreinforced masonry buildings
collapsed, indicating the need for reinforcement for adequate performance. Since them,
the use of unreinforced masonry has been prohibited in the Pacific Coast region of the
United States and present codes in the United States require that all masonry structures in
Seismic Zones 3 and 4 be reinforced. For Seismic Zone 2, some minimum of reinforcement
is specified.

Reinforcement is mainly incorporated in masonry to resist tensile and shear stresses and
to provide adequate ductility. The general basis of design is illustrated by the loaded wall
shown in Fig. 2.20(a)

Stress distributions at the base of the wall under increasing lateral load are shown in Fig.
2.20(b). Initially, bending stresses due to a lateral load are less than the stresses due to
axial compression. Tensile stresses develop in the masonry with increased lateral load and
as lateral load increases further, the tensile stress in the masonry increases to the point
where the masonry at the base cracks. Neglecting the resistance of the uncracked
masonry in tension, the bending moment at the base is resisted by the internal moments
of the resultant compressive force in the masonry and the tensile force in the steel taken
about the centroid of the section. When the lateral load on the wall is further increased,
stresses in both the masonry and steel increase, and as the wall nears failure, the stresses
in the masonry take on a nonlinear distribution, up to a limiting strain. The tension
reinforcement may or may not yield before failure.

There is another possible way for the wall to fail. The high shear force near the base
produces diagonal tension in the masonry, which may cause it to crack, as shown in Fig
2.20(a). A small amount of diagonal tension is usually allowed in masonry walls, but when
this value es exceeded, horizontal steel must be placed at these locations to resist the
tensile force.
Reinforcement made it possible to build the 28-story loadbearing Excalibur Hotel in Las
Vegas, Nevada (Seismic Zone 2) in 1989 (see Fig. 2.21). The wall at the bottom floors were
constructed with 12 in. (300 mm) concrete masonry units. The compressive strength of
the masonry was 400 psi (27.5 MPa). Vertical reinforcing bars, placed in block cores and
grouted, provided the strength and ductility to adequately resist the gravity and
earthquake loads.