Effect of the Interior Masonry Walls in the Seismic Behavior of Concrete Houses - An Experimental Study

Abstract eng:
The 1990 Census of Puerto Rico reported that 75.20 percent of the residential houses were built using a combination of concrete walls and concrete roof. A large number of these houses are constructed with reinforced concrete walls oriented primarily in one direction (strong direction), and masonry walls constructed perpendicular to the concrete walls (weak direction). In the weak direction, the masonry walls bounded by the R/C walls are the only system available to resist the inertial loads. Until now, the in-plane capacity of these masonry walls has not been clearly established, nor the lateral capacity of residential houses in the weak direction. This paper, presents the results obtained from carrying out experimental tests to full scale model of the residential houses tested in the weak direction. The experimental results showed that the lateral strength in the weak direction of a typical house increased 7 times while the lateral stiffness increased 177 times by adding unreinforced or reinforced masonry wall between the concrete walls. If unreinforced masonry walls are used, the failure mechanism will be governed by crushing of the masonry walls at the corner and the punching shear failure of the R/C walls. When reinforced masonry panels connected to the wall-slab frame were used, the collapse mechanism was governed by the failure of the last row of the concrete block wall and the punching shear failure of the R/C walls.

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