Experimental Study on Seismic Performance of Brick Masonry Cavity Wall System

Abstract

The external wall of 3 buildings of Kobe Gakuin University, Port Island campus, which have been completed this March, is constructed by the brick masonry cavity wall system of an unprecedented scale with an area of 20 thousand square meters, assembled approximately 1.27 million foreign-made bricks. This paper describes the outline of the wall system, its design flow, and the experiments conducted to examine the validity of the design methods and the component specifications. To evaluate the seismic performance, relative story displacement tests and static horizontal loading tests have been carried out on a full-scale model. Results showed that the wall system satisfied the required performance and was safe for the short-term external load.