Experimental Assessment of Hole-Drilling Residual Stress Measurement in Thin Tile Masonry Catalan Vault

Abstract

Donostia method, which is a construction material adaptation of the hole-drilling test, computes the existing stress from the relaxation of the vault, measured by a set of strain gauges arranged radially to a hole drilled while testing. The formulation proposed by the ASTM E837-20 Standard to obtain the stress state from strain gauges presents two parameters empirically obtained from the drilling procedure set-up. This makes the experimentally obtained stress state to be very sensitive to the drilling procedure precision and to the strain gauges’ arrangement. In the present paper the reliability of the Donostia method of the hole-drilling test applied to a thin tile masonry is analysed. To determine the reliability of the test, 4 masonry specimens of 450 mm high, 270 mm wide and 35 mm thick were subjected to a known compressive stress through a universal testing machine before drilling. The specimens were built with two leaves of thin tile masonry, one at each side, and one leaf of Portland cement mortar in the middle section. Eight strain gauges were arranged at the outer part of each thin tile leave, located in an A rosette shape at 45° each other with a radius of 80 mm around the drill hole. A first approximation of the reliability of this method with this type of thin-tile masonry has been studied by comparing the theoretical results based on the analytical procedure, with the experimental results obtained from the test. Preliminary results obtained from the experimental test suggest a reasonable approximation to the actual stress. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2025.