Out-of-plane seismic response of stone masonry walls: experimental and analytical study of real piers

Abstract

This paper presents the application of an existing simplified displacement-based procedure to the characterization of the nonlinear force-displacement relationship for the out-of-plane behaviour of unreinforced traditional masonry walls. According to this procedure, tri-linear models based on three different energy based criteria were constructed and confronted with three experimental tests on existing stone masonry constructions. Moreover, a brief introduction is presented regarding the main characteristics of the in situ cyclic testing recently carried out using distributed loads, as well as results obtained during the experimental campaigns performed. The comparison between the experimental and the analytical results are presented and discussed.