Seismic behavior of partially grouted masonry shear walls containing openings: Experimental testing

Abstract

This article presents an experimental study aimed at understanding the effect of openings on the seismic response of partially grouted reinforced masonry (PG-RM) walls. For this purpose, four full-scale PG-RM walls with different opening sizes were built and tested under the combined action of constant axial compression and cyclic lateral loading. All the specimens had the same external dimensions. The effect of openings was assessed in terms of wall hysteresis and force-displacement curves and the quantification of different seismic parameters such as shear capacity, degradation of lateral stiffness, energy dissipated, equivalent viscous damping ratio, and displacement ductility. A 2D Digital Image Correlation (DIC) system was implemented to monitor principal strain fields and cracking patterns during the tests. The paper also includes the assessment of the shear capacity of the tested walls according to three existent approaches developed for in-plane shear panels, which rely on the definition of an effective height of piers.The results indicate that the shear capacity of the walls decreased when the aspect ratio of the piers increased. From DIC analysis results, it was observed that damage extended beyond piers also covering spandrels and that directionality of shear loads played a fundamental role in the damage development. Therefore, the identification of the pier’s effective height and direction of seismic loads should be incorporated into the estimation of the shear capacity. Finally, the performance of the selected shear expressions and different approaches to estimate the effective height of the piers was evaluated. It was concluded that the most accurate approach was to define an effective piers height according to Augenti (2006)’s proposal using the Calder acute accent on et al. (2022) shear expression to assess piers’ lateral resistance.