Dry and wet strengthening techniques for timber frames with various infills

Abstract

Paianta houses belong to the traditional vernacular typology in Romania and have, as a main feature, the presence of the timber frame (posts, beams, and diagonals) infilled with several types of materials, such as fired earth brick masonry, earth and straw mix, wattle and daub, or timber logs. Although generally proved to behave well in earthquakes, they may exhibit large deformations of the frame, infill collapse and various other minor to moderate damage. Most of them are quite old and owned by lower income people, but recently, especially after the pandemic and energy crisis, people became more aware of resources’ economy and the demand to just improve the existing buildings, rather than to demolish and build new, slowly increased. The StrongPa project investigates for the first time in Romania the influence of various strengthening techniques on such houses and aims to provide the owners with easy to apply and low-cost solutions to improve their houses in terms of both seismic resistance and thermal comfort. The novelty of the paper is approaching the vernacular (paianta) house interventions with scientific validating methods (in-plane static cyclic experiments on walls). The results indicate low-cost, compatible and locally applicable strengthening techniques, covering a gap between vernacular practice and structural engineering while enabling performance-based retrofit selection.