Full scale shaking table test on a URM cavity wall terraced house building

Induced seismicity could expose buildings not necessarily designed for seismic actions to earthquake phenomena. This work aims at investigated the seismic behavior of a particular typology of Dutch residential building (terraced house). A shaking table test on a two-story full scale unreinforced masonry building was performed at the Eucentre laboratory within a comprehensive research programme on the seismic vulnerability of existing Dutch unreinforced masonry (URM) structures. The building specimen was meant to represent the end unit of a terraced house system, built with cavity walls and without any particular seismic design or detailing. Cavity walls are usually composed by an inner loadbearing leaf and an outer leaf having aesthetic and weather-proof functions. In the tested specimen, the loadbearing masonry was composed by calcium silicate bricks sustaining two reinforced concrete floors. A pitched timber roof was supported by two gable walls. The outer veneer was made by clay bricks connected to the inner masonry by metallic ties as in common construction practice. An incremental dynamic test was carried out up to the near-collapse limit state of the specimen. The input motions were selected to be representative of the dynamic characteristics of induced seismicity ground motions. The paper describes the characteristics of the building and presents the results obtained during the characterization and the shaking table tests, illustrating the response of the structure, the damage mechanism and its evolution during the experimental phases.