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Due to long term natural and man-made destructions, many historical sites and architect buildings are facing serious or even diminishing problems. If appropriate and urgent measures are not soon provided to maintenance or renovation of these ancient or historical architectures, many will soon be lost in our life forever, irreversibly. Ancient architecture and/ or historical buildings is a witness and footprint of our history, they represent our culture and identify, they also created and helped to develop our nationality, cultural and ethnic backgrounds, These buildings in the mean time also help nurture our sense, believeness and passion of our life, and reflect the social and economical backgrounds of the correspondent historical periods. Since there are specific and sometimes unique features for most of the historical buildings or architects, for renovation or maintenance. Specific protectional and restrictional measures are needed, unlike many policies or means for maintaining the buildings of our current time, i.e., based only on the safety consideration. This is especially true for historical architectures made from bricks, in this case, maintenance or important of the building often change the appearance of the building, in fact, creating problems for long term maintenance.
There are many different approaches in providing maintenance or enhancement for historical buildings or architects. Each measure may have their own applications, however, if used inappropriately, some of the renovation measures can often damage the highly valuable structures and appearances of the brick-built buildings, resulting in great loss of these valuable historical heritages. Therefore, this study, as an approach to renovate historical old buildings, is designed to evaluate an experimental system, by inserting an stainless steel wire network into the cement sealer space of the brick wall buildings, This building-reenhancement method is created to facilitate a reversible approach, and is also aimed to not disturb or destroy the building’s three dimensional domains and the structural systems. For this experimental research project, we have also employed steel wires with different sizes in diameter for evaluation and comparison of the most optional supporting systems for structural maintenance, in terms of both inward and outward behaviors of test brick walls.
Experimental results showed that for the steel wire-uninserted test wall samples (control), regardless of using a “shear” or “flexural” test, they experienced a drastic breaking, cracking or fast fragmentation and there was no alarm time for this activity. However, for test wall samples that were inserted with steel wires, even the test wall broke, but it would not get broken into species or fragments, In fact, for some of the enhancement-treated samples, even after they got broken, they were able to continuously support the increase of structural weight. With these experimental results obtained, we can therefore prove that the current wall-enhancement designs could effectively absorb a lot of shock ware energies when dramatically hitten by outside stress or shock forces.
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