Experimentally‐based in‐plane drift limits for the upper threshold of masonry light damage

Abstract Drift limits are useful thresholds; during design or retrofitting analyses, engineers can compare the expected behaviour of a structure to drift limits that predict when the structure will reach a certain condition. This helps ensure that structures satisfy specified performance goals when exposed to certain hazards. Masonry walls are susceptible to damage from lateral in‐plane actions such as wind or earthquake loading; ensuring that in‐plane drift remains sufficiently small will help limit this damage. Drift limits based on crack‐based damage are scarce, however, with DS1 limits being extrapolated from higher damage grades based on structural strength capacity or ductility. In this work, crack‐based damage is evaluated on a multitude of full‐scale experimental walls surveyed with digital image correlation. This method observes the initiation and propagation of cracking. Cyclically incremental in‐plane tests provide a range of drift‐damage relationships. These are explored with machine learning to determine influential predictors and ultimately establish drift limits for light damage. Two types of brick masonry are explored: fired‐clay and calcium‐silicate. For the latter, light damage begins at an in‐plane drift of 0.5 mm/m and can extend to 4.8 mm/m (or 0.48%) for the former before the masonry surpasses light damage and reaches structural damage grades. In comparison to drift limits set by other authors and (international) guidelines to characterise light damage, significant damage, or the ultimate capacity of masonry walls, the resulting drift limits for light damage from this work are set directly on the basis of experiments and are in good agreement with other authors. Most importantly, all the consulted values for ultimate capacity are much larger than the upper threshold for light damage determined herein, with limits for significant damage in the same order of magnitude. This result verifies the accuracy of the experimental crack‐based characterisation used to establish the drift thresholds.