ABSTRACT

Seismic action and unreinforced masonry is a popular scientific as well as societally relevant theme in many countries worldwide. The Netherlands started to face seismic risk, from man-made shallow earthquakes due to gas extraction in the province of Groningen. Masonry walls are extremely slender, with slenderness ratios equal to 25. Computational models for masonry are briefly reviewed and judged upon their practical performance at the structural scale, that is at building level, in a nonlinear pushover or nonlinear time history setting. A multi-level experimental campaign for Groningen masonry delivered material input and validation data at component and structural level. Both structural components and complex structures proved to be able to sustain displacement much larger than that corresponding to the peak resistance. The constitutive model can be applied in combination with regular plane stress and curved shell elements for modelling either the in-plane or the out-of-plane failure of masonry structures.