Case studies of material properties of late nineteenth-century unreinforced masonry buildings in Adelaide

Abstract

An experimental programme was developed to improve our understanding of the actual in situ strength of non-structural components in typical South Australian unreinforced masonry (URM) construction. The focus was on testing URM walls and chimneys in out-of-plane direction, and in the course of this study 132 as-built URM material specimens were collected. The specimens were tested either in situ or in laboratory. In total, four URM houses located in Darlington, a southern suburb of Adelaide, South Australia, were studied. Three of the buildings were built in the 1960s and the fourth was built in the 1980s. A comparison between the buildings material strength and the default values recommended in the Australian Masonry Standards, AS3700, suggests that the code specified default lower 5% characteristic values were often greater than the measured characteristic strength. The collected data are presented for documentation and some comparison between this and other studies are also made.