Use of EC6-like equations to estimate the compressive strength of masonry made of solid clay bricks and lime mortar

The present research is focused on the assessment of the compressive strength of historical masonries made of solid clay bricks and lime mortar, in order to reduce the need of destructive tests on existing buildings. Thus, a data-set of 52 specimen from 15 different references is collected and their different features (joint thickness, brick size and type, specimen shape and slenderness, end restraints) are taken into consideration, in order to limit, whenever possible, their effects on the scattering of the results. These homogenized data are then used to check the reliability of the most frequently adopted power equations; these power equations are used to compute the masonry compressive strength as a function of brick and mortar strengths. Results show that for these types of masonries the equations behave worse than the mean value of the experimental strengths. Thus, a proposal is made for a possible new calibration of the parameters with a robust fitting function, which allows to improve the values of R2 and to place the prediction on the safe side