Experimental Investigation of Shear Strength of Rat-Trap Bonded Masonry

Abstract

Rat-trap bonded masonry is an attractive construction technique because of its economic and environmental
advantages over conventional masonry. It is adopted for construction in most of the Asian countries. Various studies show
that different researchers have studied the compressive strength where as limited or no research work has been reported
regarding the diagonal shear and direct shear behavior of the bond. To cover this deficiency an experimental study was
carried out where triplets were tested for direct shear and prisms were tested for diagonal shear strength of RTB. The results
show that the direct and diagonal shear strength of rat-trap masonry are somehow less than the results of conventional
masonry.