LAUSR

Abstract Past earthquake disasters showed that the destruction of the infill wall not only caused massive economic losses, but also reduced the building’s functionality and hindered the restoration of the building. Therefore, improving the seismic performance of the infill wall is an alternative method to enhance the resilience of buildings. To this end, a resilient infill wall (RIW) is proposed, whose performance is improved by appropriate setting of gaps and metal connectors. Next, a full-scale one-story one-span RIW specimen and an ordinary infill wall (OIW) specimen with the same dimension and reinforcement are designed and fabricated. Cyclic loading tests are conducted to comparatively investigate the damage evolution and hysteretic performances of the RIW. Finally, the definition of damage states and the corresponding demand parameters of the RIW specimen are provided. The results demonstrate that the seismic performance of the RIW has been effectively improved. Specifically, the initial stiffness is reduced by 31% and the strength deterioration is much slower than of that of the OIW specimen. The deformability is 1.65 times that of the OIW. What’s more, the cracking and damage of the RIW is much lighter than that of the OIW at the same displacement. The story drift ratios resulting in slight damage, moderate damage, severe damage and the collapse of the RIW specimen are 0.2%, 0.67%, 1.50%, and 3.33%, respectively.