Numerical evaluation of masonry infill walls behaviour under out-of-plane loads

04 Pubblicazione in atti di convegno
Pasca Monica, Liberatore Laura, Alshawa Omar, Marson Claudia, Sorrentino Luigi

Observation of damage in seismic events has highlighted that collapse of infill walls in the out-of-plane direction may occur even for moderate intensity of ground motion. Different analytical models have been proposed in the last decades for the assessment of the out-of-plane response of infills and their applicability under different conditions has been checked also with experimental tests.
In this paper, a numerical solution is adopted by using a smeared crack approach, in which the masonry panel is modelled as a a non-linear continuum and contact surfaces are located only at the interface between masonry and frame elements; horizontal out-of-plane loads are applied monotonically as body forces.
Height/thickness ratio, height/length ratio, masonry compressive strength and stiffness of frame elements are varied to investigate their influence on the out-of-plane resistance. Results confirm previous experimental evidence, such as the inverse proportionality of the strength with respect to the span length, the strength reduction with varying height/length ratio slightly affected by masonry compressive strength and thickness.
Comparisons of the results with analytical models show that, in general, the latter give a conservative estimate of the strength, but the degree of approximation of the considered equations is strongly affected by the height/thickness of the infill, and, to a much lesser extent, by the infill height/length ratio, whereas it is not influenced by the masonry compressive strength. It is found that each equation is suitable in a different range of height/thickness ratios.

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