Energy and seismic drawbacks of masonry: a unified retrofitting solution

All over the world, a large part of existing buildings is not adequate to satisfy the safety requirement and the thermal comfort criteria. For this reason, the interest in structural and energy retrofitting systems has steadily grown in the last decades. In this scenario, an innovative thermal resistant geopolymer mortar has been developed and used for Inorganic Matrix Composite (IMC) systems aimed to a combined seismic and energy new retrofitting technique. The geopolymer-based IMC is able to ensure competitive mechanical properties with respect to the traditional lime-based IMCs and, at the same time, a significant reduction in thermal conductivity. In this paper, an experimental program is reported considering small-scaled masonry panels with double-side IMC-retrofitting and determining both the in-plane shear strength and the thermal resistance. The experimental shear tests are aimed to compare the mechanical performance of the geopolymer innovative systems with those of the traditional lime-based ones. Moreover, the thermal resistance gain of the innovative solutions was measured and compared with traditional systems. The results evidenced the effectiveness of the proposed technique that significantly improved the performances of masonry walls from both the thermal and the mechanical point of view.