Seismic fragility curves for un-reinforced masonry walls

Abstract

Quasi-static experiments have been carried out on unreinforced masonry (URM) wall specimens subject to two-way bending and a range of boundary conditions. The hysteretic behaviour so obtained from the experiments have been used to generate fragility curves which define the probability of the wall sustaining minor to severe damage in an earthquake based on different levels of ground motion intensity and boundary conditions of the wall. The calculation for the fragility curves involves the generation of filtered accelerograms which take into account a range of earthquake scenarios, site conditions and building types. The generated accelerograms have been used for input into non-linear time-history analyses for quantifying the amount of drift sustained by the URM walls in order that the level of damage can be ascertained.