Expeditious Dynamic Tests for the Estimation of Infill Masonry Wall Stiffness

The importance of assessing the overall behaviour of buildings considering the contribution of non-structural infills has been nowadays widely recognised. Indeed, infills can trigger fragile mechanisms of structural members preventing the evolution of dissipative mechanisms and can play an important role in the verifications at damageability limit states, especially in the case of strategic structures for which often high performance levels are required, including the full operativity (i.e. absence of damage to both structural and non-structural members) after severe earthquakes, in order to guarantee the building occupancy during the emergency management. With reference to a case study, the paper presents a simplified approach for estimating the stiffness of masonry infill walls through expeditious dynamic impact tests on infills. The case study is constituted by a laboratory real-scale mock-up for which a complete dynamic identification is carried out before and after the realization of infill masonry walls. The adopted procedure is then validated through results from a refined finite element model of the mock-up in which infills are modelled adopting stiffnesses obtained from the proposed approach.