Behaviour of drystack masonry wallettes under axial compression

Dry-stack masonry (DSM) systems developed in response to raising labour costs achieve structural integrity using different methods of construction. Fibre reinforced cement composite (FRCC) is used as surface rendering for the imparting strength and stiffness to the DSM system constructed using special blocks consisting of tongue and groove joints in this research. The FRCC is a patent pending product (the details of which are therefore not provided in this paper) that sandwiches a fibreglass mesh within the fibre cement - polymer matrix. To examine the behaviour of this DSM system under compression, twelve waliettes of various configurations were constructed and tested under vertical compression under face shell loading. The results are compared with waliettes of similar DSM configurations without the FRCC rendering. This paper discusses the strength and deformation characteristics of the DSM wallettes