Brick Masonry Constituent Material Property Characterization Through Impact Excitation and Ultrasonic Pulse Velocity Test.
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Brick masonry is heterogeneous, consisting of unit brick and mortar, which govern its global behavior. However, due to the variability in the property of unit brick and mortar, there is usually a variability in the mechanical properties of brick masonry structure. For preservation, rehabilitation, uncertainty quantification, and probability structural integrity assessment, this variability in mechanical property is not easily assessable using static destructive tests. To address this problem, the nondestructive testing method was proposed to characterize the properties of brick masonry constituents. The test involved Impulse Excitation Technique (IET) and Ultrasonic Pulse Velocity (UPV) tests performed on masonry brick constituents classified based on varying sizes. IET was used to assess the possible global inconsistency of the constituent dynamic properties within a specimen, and the spatial variation of the dynamic elastic properties within the specimen was investigated using the UPV test results. The correlation of the average test result of the non-destructive dynamic modulus of elasticity with an existing static elastic modulus of the same material was explored and used for global characterization of the static modulus of elasticity within the specimen. It was observed that both nondestructive test results presented coherent and correlated results. The coherence of the IET and UPV allows for the global characterization of the constituents’ static properties using both IET and UPV and for the spatial characterization based on the result obtained from the UPV test result.