Masonry Design Tab

Masonry retaining walls can also be designed in the MasterKey Retaining Wall program.

This includes:

Solid (single leaf) masonry walls
Cavity masonry walls
Concrete filled cavity walls, with optional reinforcement

This tab also controls how masonry materials are defined and how strengths are obtained from the built in material tables or from user test data.

Type of Wall

users can use the check boxes toat the top of the tab to define the wall construction. This includes:

Masonry wall
Cavity wall
Filled cavity

Defining Masonry Properties

Masonry properties can be specified separately for:

The leaf in contact with the soil (labelled Wall)
The leaf away from the soil (labelled Cladding)

In most retaining wall arrangements, the soil side leaf is the primary structural leaf.

For both inner and outer leaves, enter the required masonry specifications, including:

Brick or block type
Format or group
Manufacturing and construction class (or category)
Control class
Unit strength
Mortar designation
Unit dimensions

Based on these inputs, MasterKey automatically selects the appropriate material strengths using its built in tables and code based calculations.

Using test results

If you have project specific test data, you can enter user defined strengths to override the table values.

This is useful where:

site test data is available
product strengths differ from the standard table assumptions
a conservative or verified value is required

Brickwork Cladding on an RC Wall

If your wall is primarily reinforced concrete with a brickwork outer leaf used only as cladding, do not treat the wall as masonry.

In this case:

Remove the tick from Masonry Wall so the main wall is designed as reinforced concrete
The outer leaf and or cavity fill are not included in the wall strength checks
The outer leaf and cavity fill are included as dead weight in the base design

This approach is typically used where the cladding is architectural and not intended to act structurally with the RC wall.

If you have a reinforced concrete retaining wall with an outer leaf of brickwork cladding, remove the tick from the 'Masonry Wall' box and the main wall will be concrete. In this case the outer leaf and/or cavity fill is not used in the design of the wall but is considered as dead weight in the design of the base.

The unit strengths of the bricks and blocks are contained in a table and these appear in the unit strength droplists in the program. The values relate to bricks and blocks to British and Irish Standards and to the Eurocode Standard. If deemed necessary, values can be added to or removed from this table. To save the values just close the table.