The paper presents experimental and numerical works to assess the in-plane shear characteristics of rammed earth (RE) structures in Bhutan. The material characterization works involve compressive and tensile splitting strength tests on extracted cylindrical core samples. The effects of the RE layer thickness and drying period in the strength characteristics of the rammed earth is presented. The main experimental part reports in-plane shear tests on 3 test specimens, 1200 mm long, 1200 mm high, and 600 mm wide. The test matrix has unreinforced and reinforced specimens with variable RE layer thicknesses. For the reinforced RE specimen, the effectiveness of a simple intervention with insertion of reinforced concrete dowel at the RE block interface as a strengthening measure is discussed. Furthermore, corresponding finite element models were developed to verify the test observations. Both the experimental observations and numerical computations showed the effectiveness of proposed intervention technique in enhancing the shear strength and delaying the slip along the RE joint interface. The results showed that the shear strength of the reinforced specimen increased by 12.3% over the benchmark specimen.

The paper reports an experimental campaign to study the effectiveness of strengthening measures proposed for rammed earth (RE) wall in an out-of-plane direction. Two simple and feasible strengthening techniques were explored, namely, mesh-wrapped and timber-framed strengthening techniques. The test involved testing three full-scale U-shaped RE walls in an out-of-plane direction. The first specimen without any intervention served as the reference wall, while the two others were strengthened with two different strengthening methods. It was observed that both proposed strengthening techniques improved the load-carrying capacity of the wall and the maximum displacement and the energy absorption. The mesh-wrapped strengthening technique was found to be more effective than the timber-framed strengthening technique, which disrupted the visual aspects of the wall’s facade and needed proper anchoring to the foundation.