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• Experimental characterization of stone masonry joints made of as built materials. • Stiffness parameters were obtained for both dry and mortar stone masonry joints. • Bore-hole dilatometer and Menard pressuremeter tests on masonry infill material. • Oedometric and triaxial test results were obtained for masonry infill material. • Stiffness data for original infill material was made available for numerical models. The assessment of historical structures is a broad issue likely to comprise lab or in-situ testing at the structure, component or material levels, whenever relevant characterization of mechanical and physical properties is required. The material characterization of historical structures, particularly stone masonry ones as addressed herein, involve testing the constituent materials and their interfaces, namely stone blocks, interface joints (either dry or filled with mortar) and infill material. Besides stone, for which standard testing procedures are well established, interface joints and infill material testing are challenging issues. In such context, this paper reports a summary of the authors experience on characterizing materials, and respective interfaces, of historical constructions, aiming at providing input parameters' data for numerical simulations which are deemed useful for the scientific/technical community dealing with analysis of historical structures. The main focus of the paper is on stone masonry joints' testing and on infill material characterization by in-situ or lab tests. The reported experimental activities (e.g. borehole drilling and core sampling) can be considered as minor intrusive/destructive for the global constructions, because they are very localized and can easily repairable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a field experimental campaign carried out on an existing one-story stone masonry building, aiming at characterizing the out-of-plane behavior of its walls. A bidirectional test set-up based on a self-equilibrated airbag system was developed and used on three similar masonry walls under distinct conditions: original, retrofitted, and strengthened. The results obtained and the main advantages and shortcomings found in the test set-up are discussed. Finally, some of the most popular retrofitting and/or strengthening techniques applied during the 1998 Azores reconstruction process are critically analyzed, aiming at suggesting quantifications for future interventions on existing unreinforced masonry buildings. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Stone masonry is one of the oldest and most worldwide used building techniques. Nevertheless, the structural response of masonry structures is complex and the effective knowledge about their mechanical behaviour is still limited. This fact is particularly notorious when dealing with the description of their out-of-plane behaviour under horizontal loadings, as is the case of the earthquake action. In this context, this paper describes an experimental program, conducted in laboratory environment, aiming at characterizing the out-of-plane behaviour of traditional unreinforced stone masonry walls. In the scope of this campaign, six full-scale sacco stone masonry specimens were fully characterised regarding their most important mechanic, geometric and dynamic features and were tested resorting to two different loading techniques under three distinct vertical pre-compression states; three of the specimens were subjected to an out-of-plane surface load by means of a system of airbags and the remaining were subjected to an out-of-plane horizontal line-load at the top. From the experiments it was possible to observe that both test setups were able to globally mobilize the out-of-plane response of the walls, which presented substantial displacement capacity, with ratios of ultimate displacement to the wall thickness ranging between 26 and 45 %, as well as good energy dissipation capacity. Finally, very interesting results were also obtained from a simple analytical model used herein to compute a set of experimental-based ratios, namely between the maximum stability displacement and the wall thickness for which a mean value of about 60 % was found. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

SUMMARY The evaluation of the dynamic behaviour of rocking elements is directly correlated to the energy dissipated because of the impacts at the base interface, which can be represented by means of a coefficient of restitution. This schematization is commonly accepted as representative of the out-of-plane response of stone masonry walls. An experimental campaign (in a lab environment) aiming at assessing the value of this coefficient for a sacco granite masonry wall is presented in this work. The rocking motion at a predefined bed joint level was induced in the tested specimens in order to validate a novel test setup designed to assess the coefficient of restitution value by means of a realistic reproduction of the rocking behaviour of a single element, under the hypothesis of an infinitely stiff system above the bed joint level. As the main objective of the work was to assess the rocking behaviour of a masonry wall that looses energy at the impacts at a certain joint level, the flexural behaviour was not desirable and had to be avoided. For this purpose, a test setup based on the equivalent block approach was developed. In the final section of this work, comparisons between experimental and numerical results are presented together with some preliminary conclusions on the appropriate modelling strategy and the values of the coefficient of restitution to be used for the seismic assessment of the out-of-plane rocking behaviour of this type of sacco stone masonry walls. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]