Korfil Hi-R Masonry

[SteelPE]

I have a client who is using this type of masonry for their project. I was originally told during the design that the project was 10" masonry. While onsite for an inspection today I question whether or not the insulation was coming out of the grouted cells. The mason told me that the insulation is required to stay in the cell and that the wall was to be grouted solid (we had specified the wall to be grouted at the reinforced cells only). The wall in question is no load bearing, so I am not overly concerned at this point.

I managed to find this ICC ES report:

https://www.concreteproductsgroup.com/downloads/ICC-ES-Report.pdf

This report seems to take reduction of on the allowable tensile, flexural and shear strengths of the masonry... but no reduction on the axial capacity of the masonry.

I am just wondering how I am suppose to handle this type of construction in the future? Seems like most of my standard tables that give allowable bending capacities would no longer be valid for this type of masonry.

 

[JLNJ]

I think you would have to offset the vertical reinforcement to keep it appropriately centered in the grout space (as the ICC Report seems to indicate) and this would affect the flexural properties (better in one direction and worse in the other). I have my doubts about how the section acts compositely when the insulation is there to break the bond between the face shell and the grouted rebar, but maybe that's accounted for in the flexural strength reduction. Good luck getting the verticals in the correct, non-centered, location.

I'm guessing the axial capacity doesn't suffer too much because you still have all the face shells to rely upon. Or, if you are looking at a fully-grouted cross section, you would reduce the section based on actual area (gross minus the insulation) when you do your engineered calcs.

 

[bones206]

I'm dealing with this stuff on a project in a project being designed right now in Miami-Dade. I ended up developing custom spreadsheets for all the wall design checks. In the spreadsheets I treated the insulation as a void when calculating the section properties. It was a lot of work and I'm still not sure that I'm accounting for everything or if the wall actually behaves the way I'm idealizing it.

I personally hate dealing with proprietary insulated CMU and acoustical CMU systems. I feel like you lose any efficiencies you may have had using masonry in the first place. I try to convince architects to just use normal block walls and put conventional insulation or acoustical layers on top of the walls instead of inside the blocks.