The recent earthquake in different countries of the world, such as those in Iran (2003), Algeria (2003), India (2001), Turkey (1999) and Vrancea (1997) have shown, particularly masonry walls were damaged. Thus, masonry walls are the most vulnerable elements of buildings when subjected to earthquake loading. Therefore, it is necessary to find practical solutions by study the behavior of these walls, first without and then with retrofitting under monotonic and/or cyclic seismic loading. Presently, many methods are successfully used as reinforcement in masonry retrofitting, such as steelmesh reinforced cement mortar layer, RC tie columns and beams, etc. These traditional methods generally need much time and construction cost, so engineers are trying to find some new methods and materials to solve these problems. By increasing the use of FRP composites in civil engineering, they seem highly essential to be studied. The purpose of the study is seismic behavior of URM wall and influence of geometric characteristics and arrangement of CFRP laminates on strengthening of masonry walls. The unreinforced and reinforced walls with externally bonded carbon fiber reinforced polymer (CFRP) sheets under cyclic loading have been modeled using the FE software ABAQUS and validated with the experimental data. The results for the different strengthening systems are compared. These comparisons demonstrated the major effectiveness of FRP layers in cross position to increasing the shear performance of URM walls in term of load capacity. four walls have been modeled.

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