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

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.H. Derakhshana, Phillip Visintin and M. C. Griffit