ABSTRACT
Damage observations from recent seismic events confirm the activation of out-of-plane local mechanisms as one of the major causes of structural collapse in unreinforced masonry buildings. Whytes on either side of a cavity wall are in unreinforced masonry (URM) buildings is often typically held together by regularly spaced metal associated with the activation of local mechanisms cavity ties. Since no dynamic tests on cavity walls were found in the literature, four out-of-plane shaking table tests were conducted on full-scale masonry assemblies reproducing different cavity wall configurations with different tie distributions and one test on a single-whyte wall. The first step for a better understanding of the seismic behaviour of these walls has been trying to investigate the first mechanism, taking into account the final goal: a solid experimental reference for the development of out-of-plane fragility models for URM buildings in the Groningen area.
