Author
HUMBERTO RAMOS ROMAN and GIHAD MOHAMAD Federal University of Santa Catarina

Abstract
The way to increase the efficiency of masonry seems to be to understand fully the mortar behaviour inside the joint. It does not seem reasonable to accept that stronger units do not produce stronger masonry above a determined value of unit strength. The results have shown that confined mortars show different mechanical properties from those observed in uniaxial compression tests. The main conclusions were: mortar strength increases linearly with increasing confinement stresses, the Young’s modulus decreases linearly with lateral confinement for weak mortars and increases but not linearly for stronger mortars, the Poisson ‘s coefficient decreases significantly with increasing lateral stress for all types of mortars.