Experimental studies on the dynamic compressive and tensile strength of clay brick under high strain rates

Abstract

Abstract Clay bricks are widely used in masonry structures as well as claddings of the frame structures worldwide. During the service life of the building structures, the clay brick masonry wall might be subjected to dynamic loads such as accidental or terrorist blast loads and wind fragment impacts. In this case, the clay brick masonry wall might perform differently as compared to the static loading case, and one of the key reasons is the change of the mechanical properties of clay brick under high strain rates. However, current studies in strain rate effect on compressive and tensile strength of clay brick materials are very limited, especially on the tensile strength. Therefore, it is of great significance to study the dynamic mechanical properties of clay brick materials under different strain rates. In this paper, experiments are carried out to investigate the strain rate effect on the mechanical properties of clay bricks using different test devices: electronic testing machine, INSTRON high-speed testing machine, and the split Hopkinson pressure bar. Both the static and dynamic properties of clay bricks at the strain rates between 1.0E-6\xa0s−1 and 224\xa0s−1 are studied. Empirical relations between dynamic increase factors (DIF) for the compressive and tensile strength of clay brick and strain rate were also proposed.