The Earthquake Engineering Online Archive

Shaking table study of single-story masonry houses: dynamic performance under three component seismic input and recommendations

Manos, George C.; Clough, Ray W.; Mayes, Ronald L.

UCB/EERC-83/11, Earthquake Engineering Research Center, University of California, Berkeley, 1983-07, 156 pages (515/M223/1983)

Five masonry house models have been tested on the earthquake simulator (shaking table) of the Univ. of California, Berkeley, in an investigation aimed at establishing reasonable reinforcement requirements for single-story masonry dwellings in Seismic Zone 2 of the Uniform Building Code. Each of the models was a 16-ft-square masonry house consisting of four wall panels with standard size door and window openings, connected to a timber truss roof to which weights were added in order to obtain realistic loads on the load-bearing walls. The first four houses were tested with the horizontal component of the input parallel to two of the walls and perpendicular to the other two walls. This report contains the results of the tests of House 5 which was oriented on the shaking table so that its walls were simultaneously subjected to two horizontal components and a vertical component of input motion. Initially, the walls of House 5 were unreinforced; then, a second series of tests was carried out with the walls partially reinforced. A detailed analysis of the results for House 5 is presented and the dynamic response of House 5 is compared with the responses of Houses 2 through 4. Finally, by extrapolating the earthquake performance of the test structures to prototype conditions, recommendations are made for requirements for the lengths of the shear-resisting elements of both unreinforced and partially reinforced masonry walls.

Available online: http://nisee.berkeley.edu/documents/EERC/EERC-83-11.pdf (10 MB)