OUT OF PLANE CAPACITY OF INFILLS AFTER IN PLANE LOADING: A PREDICTION ANALYTICAL MODEL

Earthquakes produce on infills In-Plane (IP) and Out-Of-Plane (OOP) actions. The recent earthquakes have proved that the OOP collapse of infills is a diffused mechanism also in buildings designed to resist to seismic events in agreement to the most modern strategies. This fact makes the question arises about the safety of infills with respect OOP actions. The strong interaction between IP and OOP behaviour of infills traduces in a progressively reduction of the OOP strength. Further, only in few cases codes suggest adequate strategies to face this issue. For what above, in the paper the reduction of OOP strength because of the IP damage is studied by an extended numerical experimental campaign based on FE models to be considered as complementary to the very few laboratory experimental tests available in the literature