c. Recognising that the out of plane behaviour of masonry panels has been the subject of much previous work (Key, 1998), effort has now concentrated on the detailed analysis of masonry shear walls, the primary structural element in masonry
buildings. These shear walls are described below. The main objectives of the analyses were to provide some comparison between the performance of the walls with and without strengthening and to continue to explore the potential of the DE technique
including modelled reinforcement applied to masonry under dynamic loading. An on-going programme of strengthening projects using the DE method to predict the ultimate strength of masonry arches, including comparisons with full scale tests, has
shown the technique to be very accurate and better than alternative analyses for the case of static loading. Further work involving the out of plane prediction of masonry wall behaviour under high-speed dynamic loads arising from blast is also
encouraging.
Figure 1. Typical installed Cintec Anchor
6. Description
The masonry shear wall under investigation is shown in Figure 2. The wall is 6.15m (20ft 2in) wide and 6.76m (22ft 2in) high, has shallow foundations over rock and has been considered with and without a large opening in each storey. It forms
the shorter side of the rectangular building shown in Figure 3 and supports two floors capable of behaving as diaphragms. The longer side walls (not explicitly modelled) partly support the floors, and have little out-of-plane shear resistance.
Vertical body forces and imposed loads are supported uniformly by all of the external walls. Loads developed by horizontal seismic ground accelerations in the transverse direction of the building are resisted by in-plane forces in the side walls.
One of these walls is the subject of the current investigation.
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