Interaction of masonry walls and shear walls in masonry buildings

In most seismic regions of the world, many unreinforced masonry buildings have been constructed for different uses, including schools. Statistical analyses showed that 90% of schools on the retrofitting list in Iran are unreinforced masonry buildings. The addition of shear walls is a frequently used retrofitting method in these buildings. However, in most seismic rehabilitation projects, the lateral resistance of the masonry walls is neglected when determining the lateral resistance of the building and therefore the whole lateral resistance of the structure is provided by the newly added shear walls. In this study, the effects of including the lateral resistance of masonry walls in resisting seismic loads was investigated in order to reduce the cost of retrofitting. To achieve this, it was necessary to properly assess the non-linear behaviour of masonry buildings. This paper presents a modelling technique for non-linear static and dynamic analyses of masonry buildings in order to investigate the interaction between masonry walls and squat shear walls. By including masonry walls in the lateral resistance of a building, a considerable reduction in maximum drift was observed. For the representative building considered in this study, the lateral drift of the building decreased by 30% in the north-south direction and by 10% in the east-west direction.