Experimental shear performance of old masonry walls typical of Eastern Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Eastern Canada’s unreinforced masonry (URM) buildings are amongst the most seismically vulnerable structures in North America, contributing to the high earthquake risk characterizing St. Lawrence River valley. However, the seismic performance of their URM walls is still mostly unknown, preventing the informed design of rational repair and retrofit interventions. Of particular interest are the URM components built with clay bricks and lime mortar in the 19th century, featuring common bond pattern and timber inclusions in unique multi-wythe arrangements. Adapted to local climate and resources by European settlers, these vernacular systems are largely widespread in populous urban centres. This paper is the first to present a comprehensive experimental study on the in-plane (IP) diagonal strength of mixed URM-timber walls typical of Eastern Canada, as well as to determine the mechanical characteristics of their components. To this end, four full-scale URM walls extracted from an existing building in Montréal (QC, Canada) were tested under diagonal compression. Through the combined use of Digital Image Correlation (DIC) and a modified ASTM E519 setup tailored to accommodate fragile specimens, and by testing original walls with timber inclusions at different heights, this research provides valuable insights on the influence of typical construction methods on the structural performance of local URM walls under lateral loading, while also unprecedently deriving shear strength and drift capacity parameters required for code-based seismic evaluation. Comparison against past experimental data also highlights the peculiar seismic response to be expected from Eastern Canada’s old URM, something critical that could not be quantified before. • First in-plane diagonal tests ever performed on extracted masonry walls in Canada. • First tests quantifying shear strength of 19th century masonry walls typical of Eastern Canada. • Unique extracted samples including timber beams and units embedded into unreinforced masonry. • First diagonal compression tests on unreinforced masonry walls with attached veneer. • Unprecedented mechanical characterization of old clay bricks, lime mortar and timber inclusions.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".