Confined vs. unreinforced masonry: Construction and shaking table tests of two-storey buildings

Confined masonry (CM) is a simple, convenient and effective building construction technology in seismic areas. Although a large background of experimental testing aimed to study the behavior of CM walls to vertical and in-plane lateral loads is available in literature, only a few experimental studies about the CM buildings behavior to seismic loads have been carried out. In this work, the results of a series of shaking-table tests carried out on two-storey unreinforced (URM) and confined masonry (CM) buildings are presented. Two structural systems with the same geometry were built and tested on a shaking table, in order to compare the dynamic response of the two different construction systems. The structures were subjected to seismic accelerations of increasing intensity yielding performance states ranging from minor damage to near collapse. The paper describes both the dynamic response using intensity measures, drift and acceleration profiles, and the observed damage evolution. The obtained results highlight the better performance of CM vs URM to withstand dynamic loads and provide crucial information to be used for numerical models calibration and response estimation.