The progressive damage and subsequent demolition of unreinforced masonry (URM) buildings arising from the Canterbury earthquake sequence is reported. A dataset was compiled of all URM buildings located within the Christchurch CBD, including information on location, building characteristics, and damage levels after each major earthquake in this sequence. A general description of the overall damage and the hazard to both building occupants and to nearby pedestrians due to debris falling from URM buildings is presented with several case study buildings used to describe the accumulation of damage over the earthquake sequence. The benefit of seismic improvement techniques that had been installed to URM buildings is shown by the reduced damage ratios reported for increased levels of retrofit. Demolition statistics for URM buildings in the Christchurch CBD are also reported and discussed.
Authors may post the final draft of their work on open, unrestricted Internet sites or deposit it in an institutional repository when the draft contains a link to the bibliographic record of the published version in the ASCE Civil Engineering Database. "Final draft" means the version submitted to ASCE after peer review and prior to copyediting or other ASCE production activities; it does not include the copyedited version, the page proof, or a PDF of the published version. Horizontal crack height, masonry compressive strength, and diaphragm support stiffness properties are assumed as variables, and sensitivity analyses are performed to study the influence of these parameters on the cracked wall characteristic behavior. The parametric studies show that crack height significantly influences wall stability by affecting both the instability displacement and the wall lateral resistance. The reduction in cracked wall lateral resistance and in the instability displacement due to finite masonry compressive strength is shown to be significantly amplified by the applied overburden. A study using the typical configuration of flexible diaphragms and URM walls indicates that the wall top support flexibility does not significantly influence cracked wall out-of-plane response. An existing simplified wall behavioral model is improved, and a procedure is proposed for calculation of the wall out-of-plane response envelope.
SUMMARYA simplified numerical model was used to investigate the out-of-plane seismic response of vertically spanning unreinforced masonry (URM) wall strips. The URM wall strips were assumed to span between two flexible diaphragms and to develop a horizontal crack above the wall mid-height. Three degrees of freedom were used to accommodate the wall displacement at the crack height and at the diaphragm connections, and the wall dynamic stability was studied. The equations of dynamic motion were obtained using principles of rocking mechanics of rigid bodies, and the formulae were modified to include semirigid wall behaviour. Parametric studies were conducted that included calculation of the wall response for different values of diaphragm stiffness, wall properties, applied overburden, wall geometry and earthquake ground motions. The results of the study suggest that stiffening the horizontal diaphragms of typical low-rise URM buildings will amplify the out-of-plane acceleration demand imposed on the wall and especially on the wall-diaphragm connections. It was found that upper-storey walls connected to two flexible diaphragms had reduced stability for applied earthquake accelerograms having dominant frequency content that was comparable with the frequency of the diaphragms. It was also found that the applied overburden reduced wall stability by reducing the allowable wall rotations. The results of this study suggest that the existing American Society of Civil Engineers recommendations for assessment of vertically spanning walls overestimate the stability of top-storey walls in multi-storey buildings in high-seismic regions or for walls connected to larger period (less stiff) diaphragms.
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