The Earthquake Engineering Online Archive

Models for nonlinear earthquake analysis of brick masonry buildings

Mengi, Yalçin; McNiven, Hugh D.; Tanrikulu, A. Kamil

UCB/EERC-92/03, Earthquake Engineering Research Center, University of California, Berkeley, 1992-03, 148 pages (530/M46/1992)

Mathematical models are proposed for the three-dimensional, nonlinear earthquake analysis of unreinforced and reinforced brick masonry buildings. In the development of the models, the floors are modeled as rigid diaphragms. For the unreinforced case, it is assumed that the wall elements possess only shear resistance and only in their own planes. For the reinforced case, the stiffness of wall elements in out-of-plane directions is taken into account. In view of the data obtained from shaking table experiments, a bilinear form for the shear modulus of the masonry wall materials and a trilinear form for its viscous counterpart are assumed in the analysis of their variations with shear strain. For the nonlinear earthquake analysis of masonry buildings, two different approaches are used. The first one involves the use of the equivalent linear method (ELM). ELM finds the nonlinear earthquake response of a masonry building approximately through iterations. The second approach employs the actual nonlinear model, which takes into account hysteretic behavior of wall elements established experimentally in shaking table experiments. To assess the models, five example problems are presented.

Available online: http://nisee.berkeley.edu/documents/EERC/EERC-92-03.pdf (3 MB)