ON THE IN-PLANE FLEXURAL RESPONSE OF CANTILEVER UNREINFORCED CLAY BRICKWORK MASONRY WALL PANELS

This paper studies the in-plane response of unreinforced clay brickwork masonry wall panels. For this purpose, a non-linear three-dimensional heterogenous Finite Element (FE) model was developed using ABAQUS software. The model was validated against experimental studies obtained from the literature. Then, a parametric study was undertaken to investigate the effects of a) pre-compression, b) Height to Length ratio (H/L) of the wall and c) H/L of the masonry units on the in-plane strength, initial stiffness, peak drift and ultimate drift limit. Finally, results obtained from the FE computational models compared against those obtained from design codes (Eurocode) for determining the in-plane force capacity and drift capacity of the URM walls. From the analysis of results it was found that in most cases, Eurocode overestimates the ultimate drift ratio when compared to the findings from the FE analyses.