Out‐of‐plane shaking table tests of full‐scale historic adobe corner walls retrofitted with timber elements

Historic adobe structures pose a high seismic risk mainly because of the poor out-of-plane bending response of their walls that may produce fatalities and significant economic, cultural, and heritage losses. In this paper, we propose a retrofitting technique that increases the wall strength for both in-plane and out-of-plane directions. This technique consists of vertical and horizontal timber elements symmetrically installed on each face of the wall to form a confining wood frame, supplemented with vertical tensors that pre-compress the wall. This study evaluates the performance of this retrofitting technique with a two-set experimental program on full-scale historic adobe walls. On the first set, four specimens were subjected to a static overturning test with boundary conditions representing the confinement effect at both ends by orthogonal walls. On the second set, three full-scale specimens, one unretrofitted and two retrofitted, were subjected to four ground motion records on a shaking table to assess the out-of-plane dynamic behavior of typical corner walls. The unretrofitted specimen collapsed during the second motion (peak ground acceleration [PGA] = 0.39 g), while both retrofitted walls survived all four motions (maximum PGA of 0.75 g) proving the high effectiveness of the proposed retrofitting. The addition of base anchors as a variation of the retrofitting technique significantly reduced the rocking effects and the residual drifts of the system, thus improving its overall seismic performance. Further research is needed to develop guidelines for seismic retrofit of heritage buildings including multistory full-scale tests of specimens with various types of openings and retrofitting strategies that minimize their architectural impact.