Response of Arching Unreinforced Concrete Masonry Walls to Blast Loading

New standards for blast protection of buildings are currently being developed in the United States and Canada. In this regard, both standards are considering unreinforced masonry (URM) walls as particularly vulnerable to blast events and may not be used in blast-resisting structural systems. In this paper, the effectiveness of enforcing arching action as a cost-effective hardening technique for vertically spanning one-way URM walls under blast …