ANALYSIS OF A NOVEL IN-SITU STRENGTHENING TECHNIQUE FOR TILING SYSTEMS BASED ON EXPERIMENTS AND NUMERICAL MODELING

Delamination of tiles can be found in many exterior wall tiling systems, resulting in economic losses and casualties. The traditional solution to this problem is characterized by the high repair cost, low reutilization of waste ceramics, and intensive energy requirements for new ceramics production. This paper proposed a novel in-situ strengthing technique using polyurea to cover the exterior wall tiling systems accompanied by mechanical anchoring. Pull-out tests were conducted on tiling systems without strengthening and the systems strengthened with polyurea coating. The results show that the use of polyurea changes the failure mode of the system from brittle to ductile, which also remarkably improves the bearing capacity and deformation capacity of the system. In addition, three-dimensional finite element models of the tiling system before and after strengthening were established, in which a cohesive model was used to simulate the behavior of the tile-mortar and tile-polyurea interfaces, and the numerical results agreed well with experimental observations.