Out-of-plane behaviour of tall reinforced masonry walls.

In the framework of the DISWall research project, funded by the European Commission, innovative construction systems for load and non-load-bearing reinforced masonry walls were developed. In particular, reinforced masonry systems, made with vertically perforated clay units and aimed at building mainly tall, load bearing reinforced masonry walls for factories, sport centres, commercial buildings, etc, were studied for the application in areas characterized by low to high seismic hazard. The verification of this kind of walls for out of plane loading is not completely clarified. Therefore, a specific testing program was carried out. The tests were aimed first, at obtaining the basic mechanical characterization of the reinforced masonry system, and second, at reproducing the behaviour of reinforced masonry buildings provided with deformable roofs. In this case, the walls can be tentatively considered as cantilevers with a vertical load applied at the top and a horizontal load due to the masses of both the roof and the wall itself. To test the walls with this structural configuration, two real scale frames, composed by two parallel reinforced masonry walls, 6 m high, vertically loaded by means of a heavy steel/concrete slab, were built and subjected to cyclic out-of-plane tests, by applying a horizontal load at the level of the top slab. In the present contribution, the first results of the experimental tests are presented and discussed.