

Walls built with CHB have the following advantages and disadvantages: We mainly use concrete Hollow Blocks or CHBs for modular use, price, and portability. It’s used to lay out the “structural skeleton” of a building to be reinforced later on by beams and columns. What is a CHB?Ĭoncrete Hollow Blocks are a common building material used in the Philippines. With concrete hollow blocks (CHB) commonly used in the country, here are a couple of things that you need to know about the basics of common masonry in the Philippine construction industry. hollow blocks, stone, and bricks) and binding them together with rebar and cement mortar. Masonry is a building process that involves the laying of individual blocks (e.g. They are essential building blocks of a structure, as we need them to strengthen it and help it last longer. There are a lot of other bits of good information in this partially hidden treasue of technical and practical information.Laying out concrete hollow blocks is common masonry in the Philippines. This could get you past the microscopic method of looking at the individual pieces and look at the wall section as a strucural element. If you look at section 14 for structural notes, TEK Notes 14-6 (Bond patterns) and 14-7 (working stress?) will give you good information and explain how intermediate bond beams can make a stack bond panel act like structural element just as a running bond panel does normally.
MASONRY STACK BOND CODE
The TEK note are written by professional engineers that hold prominent positions on most national code and standards groups (ASTM, ACI, TMS, IBC, etc.). Click on that, then on a state (any state) and a producer (any producer)to gain access to the 140 TEK notes on many different subjects. Look at the uper right quadrant of the home page for the TEK notes. In addition to the ACI 530 and the commentaries, a very good source to explain how masonry works go to the Natioanl concrete Masonry Association (NCMA) site. If this is the case and you assume a control joint on each side of each block in stack bond, then wouldn't the same requirement hold true? RE: Stack Bond Masonry JAE (Structural) 7 Jan 09 13:28


If you count on the joint reinforcement to transfer the load then I would need to specify truss type joint reinforcement, right? Because the ladder type would be unstable for load normal to the wall.Īlso, I was under the impression that the vertical bars required on each side of a normal vertical control joint in cmu walls was required for the very reason I mentioned above.

If this is the case, how does the lateral load get to the grouted, reinforced cells? It seems to me that you would have to have a vertical bar in each block. I can't justify in my head that if I have vertical bars at say, 48"o.c., that the lateral load on the un-reinforced portions of the wall will transfer to the reinforced cells across the continuous head joints.Įverything I read says that you should think of stack bond as 16" vertical pilasters with a vertical joint on each side of the blocks. I have some pretty high walls and I am concered about the behavior of the stack bond under wind load. The architect has specified stack bond for aesthetics. I am the structural engineer for the job and this is the first time that stack bond has come up on a job for me.
