Identifying Masonry Buildings That Are under High Seismic Risk

Masonry has been one of the most popular construction materials for centuries as it provided economical solutions for sheltering problems worldwide. Turkey, as a country with significant portion of its land in seismic zones, has a masonry building stock in the order of millions, most of which built in the twentieth century. In addition to the complications associated with anisotropic and composite nature of masonry buildings, the accurate estimation of seismic demands with simple yet accurate analytical tools is an extremely challenging task. A comprehensive research project was initiated at Middle East Technical University comprising of in-situ material strength determination from ten existing masonry buildings, two building tests including forced vibration and lateral load testing, and numerical simulations for calibration and modelling of existing masonry buildings. Making use of these experimental and simulation results, available seismic assessment techniques based on linear elastic analysis were refined. More specifically, lower bound material strength values, effective pier stiffness models and performance limit states for masonry walls were proposed. The overviews of the proposed revisions, which are currently under consideration by the committee, are presented in this paper