Seismic capacity of adobe dwellings

Abstract

In this paper the seismic capacity of adobe dwellings, in-plane and out-of-plane, is analyzed in terms of the displacement capacity and the period of vibration. For the former, cyclic and dynamic tests carried out at the Catholic University of Peru (PUCP) has been analyzed to obtain limit states (LS) for adobe walls and damping values for each LS. The period of vibration obtained from the experimental test results were compared with the results of elastic numerical analysis, where different configurations of adobe buildings were simulated. Then, an expression to compute the elastic period of vibration of adobe dwellings was obtained in function of the walls height. For the out-of-plane behaviour the displacement capacity is obtained from a linearized displacement-based approach, which estimates the maximum displacement that an adobe wall can support without collapsing. The period of vibration is obtained based on the collapse mechanism selected for each wall, which is a function of the wall geometrical properties and the boundary conditions.