Behaviour of wide spaced reinforced masonry walls under inplane cyclic loading

Wide spaced reinforced masonry (WSRM) walls subjected to inplane loading exhibit complex structural behaviour that is not well understood in spite of a few years of investigation in several parts of the world. WSRM walls described in this paper contain only vertical reinforcement with spacing ranging from 800mm to 2000mm. With a view to examining the effect of the spacing ratio (defined as the ratio of spacing of vertical reinforcement at the central region to the end region of the wall) of vertical reinforcement, several full-scale, single leaf, clay block WSRM shear walls were constructed and tested under inplane horizontal and vertical loading at Central Queensland University. This paper presents the failure and deformation characteristics of the WSRM shear walls tested under monotonic and cyclic loading. It has been shown that WSRM shear walls posses a good level of ductility and do not exhibit rapid stiffness degradation until the ultimate stage.