Masonry Materials and Structures

A team of experts investigates the properties, load-bearing capacity and reuse of masonry materials and structures through advanced experimental and numerical techniques.

Aesthetic beauty and durability, sound and thermal properties, associated with low cost and resource availability make masonry among the most widely used construction materials across the globe. This material is highly versatile as it can take on an array of forms, sizes, patterns and functions. However, its low tensile strength is a limiting factor in situations such as settlements, earthquakes, impacts and explosions, where considerable lateral forces need to be resisted. Accordingly, strengthening, restoration and repair techniques need to be tailored to support this material without modifying its architecture.

Our offer

We offer standardized testing of both virgin and recycled masonry materials, as well as guidance on issues related to test selection, CE-marking and other types of certification. Detailed experiments to assess the effect of a specific loading - deadloads, earthquakes, impacts and explosions - can also be conducted on the material, component and structural levels upon request.

We model masonry structures to verify if they meet specified code provisions - e.g. Eurocode 6, Eurocode 8 - or in combination with experiments to research their capacity to withstand the given design loads.