Observations on out-of-plane behaviour of URM walls in buildings with RC slabs

In Switzerland many new residential buildings are constructed as unreinforced masonry (URM) structures or as mixed structures where URM walls are coupled with reinforced concrete (RC) walls by RC slabs. At present the boundary conditions of URM walls subjected to out-of-plane accelerations are still not well quantified. In the framework of a large research activity on RC-URM wall structures a shake-table test on a four-storey mixed structure was performed. The test specimen, which was built at half-scale, was designed in such a way to allow the collection of data on the effect of boundary conditions provided by the RC slabs and adjacent RC walls on the out-of-plane seismic behaviour of URM piers. This paper presents observations on the out-of-plane behaviour of the URM walls from the shake-table test and draws conclusions for the boundary conditions to be applied in numerical studies on URM piers in mixed RC-URM wall structures.