• Earthquakes and Structures
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• v.9 no.4
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• pp.789-830
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• 2015

The recent re-assessment of the seismic hazard in Europe led for many regions of low to moderate seismicity to an increase in the seismic demand. As a consequence, several modern unreinforced masonry (URM) buildings, constructed with reinforced concrete (RC) slabs that provide an efficient rigid diaphragm action, no longer satisfy the seismic design check and have been retrofitted by adding or replacing URM walls with RC walls. Of late, also several new construction projects have been conceived directly as buildings with both RC and URM walls. Despite the widespread use of such construction technique, very little is known about the seismic behaviour of mixed RC-URM wall structures and codes do not provide adequate support to designers. The aim of the paper is therefore to propose a displacement-based design methodology for the design of mixed RC-URM edifices and the retrofit of URM buildings by replacing or adding selected URM walls with RC ones. The article describes also two tools developed for estimating important quantities relevant for the displacement-based design of structures with both RC and URM walls. The tools are (i) a mechanical model based on the shear-flexure interaction between URM and RC walls and (ii) an elastic model for estimating the contribution of the RC slabs to the overturning moment capacity of the system. In the last part of the article the proposed design method is verified through nonlinear dynamic analyses of several case studies. These results show that the proposed design approach has the ability of controlling the displacement profile of the designed structures, avoiding concentration of deformations in one single storey, a typical feature of URM wall structures.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.84 no.4
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• pp.479-488
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• 2022

Aiming to examine different failure patterns in multistory URM walls, two 1/3 scaled three-story and three-bay URM models were designed for the quasi-static loading tests to contrastively investigate the failure processes and characteristics of the multistory URM walls. Two different failure responses were observed with special attention paid to the behavior of spandrel-failure mode. By evaluating the seismic performance and deformation behavior of two test walls, it is demonstrated that spandrels, that haven't been properly designed in some codes, are of great significance in the failure of entire URM walls. Additionally, compared with pier-failure mode, spandrel-failure for multistory URM building is more reasonable and advisable as its effectively participation in energy dissipation and its efficiently improvement on seismic capacity and deformation in the overall structure. Furthermore, the experimental results are beneficial to improve seismic design and optimize reinforcement method of URM buildings.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.6 no.7
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• pp.801-815
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• 1998

An overview of an analytical model to predict mortar joint failure in unreinforced masonry (URM) structures is presented. The validity of the model is established by comparison with experimental results at element level as well as structure level. This model is then used to study the behavior of URM walls and two commonly used retrofitting schemes. Finally, effectiveness of the two retrofitting schemes in increasing strength and stiffness of existing URM walls is discussed.

• Proceedings of the Korea Concrete Institute Conference
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• 2006.11a
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• pp.69-72
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• 2006

The objective of this study is to find out the shear capacity of URM wall and the variables that affect the shear capacity of URM wall such as the opening and the aspect ratio, considering four kinds of failure modes, sliding shear failure, toe crushing failure, and diagonal shear failure. The main varialble is the shape of opening of URM walls. First URM has one door, second has one window, third hase one door and one window, the last has two windows. The test results of URM with openings show that the specimens are governed by rocking failure mode.

• Earthquakes and Structures
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• v.14 no.5
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• pp.449-458
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• 2018

Earthquakes have shown the vulnerability of unreinforced masonry (URM) structures. The aim of this research is to study a technique for in-plane seismic retrofitting of URM walls in which both diagonal and vertical steel strips are added to a single side of a URM wall. Specimens have been tested under quasi-static cyclic lateral load in combination with constant vertical load. The tests show that vertical and diagonal strips cause a significant increase in seismic capacity in terms of both strength (about 200%) and displacement at maximum (about 20%). Furthermore, this technique caused the failure modes of URM walls were influenced.

• Journal of the Earthquake Engineering Society of Korea
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• v.20 no.5
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• pp.277-283
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• 2016

Unreinforced masonry (URM) buildings are known to be highly vulnerable to seismic loadings. Although significant physical variation may exist for URM buildings that fall into a same structural category, a single set of fragility curves is typically used as a representation of the seismic vulnerability of the URM structures. This study investigates the effect of physical variation of URM structures on their seismic performance level. Variables that describe the physical variation of the structure are defined based on the inventory analysis. Seismic behavior of the structures is then monitored by changing the variables to investigate the effect of each variable. The analysis results show that among the variables considered the seismic performance of URM building depends on the variation of the width, the aspect ratio, and the number of story. The need for further research on the modeling of the connections between the walls and diaphragms and the torsional effect is also addressed.

• Proceedings of the Computational Structural Engineering Institute Conference
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• 2001.10a
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• pp.531-536
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• 2001

URM buildings have been damaged seriously during earthquake since they were not designed to resist lateral loads. It has led to the importance of studying the behavior and capacity for URM building. The objective of this study is to evaluate seismic performance of URM (Unreinforced Masonry) building. For this purpose, this paper discuss the response of 2 story reduced-scale building subjected to earthquake motion and compare them using existing guidelines to provide improved knowledge for URM building.

• Earthquakes and Structures
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• v.13 no.3
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• pp.309-322
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• 2017

In this paper, a simplified evaluation method of the skeleton curve for reinforced concrete (RC) frame with unreinforced masonry (URM) infill is proposed in a practical form, based on the previous studies. The backbone curve for RC boundary frame was modeled by a tri-linear envelope with cracking and yielding points. On the other hand, that of URM infill was modeled by representative characteristic points of cracking, maximum, and residual strength; also, the interaction effect between RC boundary frame and the infill was taken into account. The overall force-displacement envelopes by the sum of RC boundary frame and URM infill, where the backbone curves of the infill from other studies were also considered, were then compared with the previous experimental results. The simplified estimation results from this study were found to almost approximate the overall experimental results with conservative evaluations, and they showed much better agreement than the cases employing the infill envelopes from other studies.

• Architectural research
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• v.15 no.3
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• pp.159-166
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• 2013

This study was aimed at analyzing the three-step seismic performance evaluation procedure of Korea Infrastructure Safety Cooperation and proposing a new procedure suitable for unreinforced masonry buildings in Korea. For the study, it was investigated the performance evaluation results of five example URM buildings. First of all, it was found that the performance evaluation procedure for the URM buildings should be different from that for the other structural systems. As a result, a simple procedure of seismic performance evaluation was proposed, which includes elimination of elastic and inelastic push-over analysis and reduction of performance levels and evaluation steps. With the simple procedure, the URM buildings could be evaluated more easily than the other structures. It would be expected that the procedure can provide structural engineers with a simple and easy way to evaluate the seismic performance of the Korean URM buildings. Nevertheless, the procedure must be revised continuously by reflecting new research products for the URM buildings in Korea.

• Earthquakes and Structures
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• v.23 no.6
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• pp.527-534
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• 2022

EDCC (Eco-Friendly Ductile Cementitious Composites) is a recently created class of engineered cementitious composites that exhibit extremely high ductility and elastoplastic behavior under pure tension. EDCC contains reduced amounts of cement and very large volumes of fly ash. Due to these properties, EDCC has become one of the solutions to use in seismic upgrading. This paper discloses previous studies and research that discussed the seismic upgrading of unreinforced, non-grouted, unconfined, and non-load bearing masonry walls which are called URM infill walls using the EDCC technique. URM infill wall is one of the weak links in the building structure to withstand the earthquake waves, as the brittle behavior of the URM infill walls behaves poorly during seismic events. The purpose of this study is to fill a knowledge gap about the theoretical and experimental ways to use the EDCC in URM infill walls. The findings reflect the ability of the EDCC to change the behavior from brittle to ductile to a certain percentage behavior, increasing the overall drift before collapse as it increases the energy dissipation, and resists significant shaking under extensive levels with various types and intensities.