LAUSR

There are different techniques for masonry construction. Among these, confined masonry (CM) buildings may be regarded as an upgrade for unreinforced masonry (URM) buildings, which is the most common type. In Turkey, URM construction has been popular, especially up to the end of 1980s. These rather old URM buildings constitute a significant percent of the existing building stock. On the other hand, CM construction seems to be rare when compared to its URM counterpart in Turkey. This fact was also reflected in older versions of the Turkish seismic design codes as clauses regarding CM construction did not exist in these codes. In 2018, a new version of the Turkish seismic design code has been released, taking into account CM construction for the first time explicitly. In accordance with this fact, this study presents a comparison between the seismic performances of URM and CM building types at component and structure levels. The first phase of the study focuses on the capacity curves of URM and CM walls that have been idealized by using a piece-wise linear model with different performance limits. Empirical formulations from previous research are examined to determine the capacity curve parameters with the premise that they have the best estimate for the selected experimental dataset concerning URM and CM wall specimens. The second phase deals with the seismic performance in structure level for URM and CM buildings that are composed of masonry walls with idealized capacity curves as obtained in the first phase of the study. Capacity Spectrum Method is used for the analyses. The results reveal the superior behavior of CM construction over URM construction during seismic action.