An experimental programme was conducted in which eight full-scale unreinforced masonry walls were subjected to cyclic face loading using a system of airbags. Of the eight walls, six contained a window opening and four were subjected to vertical pre-compression. Combined supports at the vertical and horizontal edges ensured that under face loading the walls underwent two-way bending. The test walls were found to possess good post-peak strength and displacement capacity as well as reasonable energy dissipation characteristics. Significant strength and stiffness degradation and non-symmetry of strength in the positive and negative displacement directions were also evident. Discussion of the causes of the aforementioned trends and their implications towards the seismic response of masonry walls is provided. and limited displacement capacity perpendicular to the wall face, slender masonry walls (heightto-thickness greater than 10) are especially prone to out-of-plane failure which has been identified as one of the most dominant modes of failure in masonry construction during seismic loading [1].As part of a long-term goal to reduce the seismic risk posed by URM construction, research is currently underway to develop suitable design and assessment procedures to protect against this type of failure. Research into the out-of-plane seismic response of vertically spanning URM panels [10] has led to the development of a simplified displacement-based (DB) design procedure. DB methods have gained popularity in recent years for the seismic design and assessment of ductile structural systems including multi-storey buildings [11,12], continuous concrete bridges [13] and in-plane masonry walls [14]. The overall aim of the current research is to develop a DB design procedure for two-way spanning masonry walls, which include any class of walls supported on at least one vertical edge and one horizontal edge. However, the development of such a method requires the load-displacement behaviour of two-way walls to be properly understood and characterized through experimental tests under the application of cyclic loading.While a significant amount of experimental research has been conducted into the static strength of URM walls in out-of-plane flexure (e.g. [15-18]), published literature reporting quasi-static cyclic tests or dynamic tests on such wall panels is limited. Most of the out-of-plane cyclic load tests on masonry panels have been performed on one-way spanning walls supported at their top and bottom edges and include tests using standard URM [19-21], as well as URM strengthened by various means including fibre reinforced polymer (FRP) strips [22], expansive epoxy [23] and timber backup framing [24, 25]. Benedetti et al.[26] conducted a study of dynamic shaking table tests on 24 half-scale two-storey masonry buildings which focused on the overall building response with limited attention given to the two-way out-of-plane flexural response of component walls. Cyclic tests on two-way spanning walls in bending are especially rare, bu...

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After the embargo period  via non-commercial hosting platforms such as their institutional repository  via commercial sites with which Elsevier has an agreement In all cases accepted manuscripts should:  link to the formal publication via its DOI  bear a CC-BY-NC-ND licensethis is easy to do  if aggregated with other manuscripts, for example in a repository or other site, be

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