Experimental out-of-plane damage limits of historical stone masonry walls

•Mechanic and dynamic characterization of a historical stone masonry structure.•Material design representing the properties of the reference structure.•Static cyclic out-of-plane tests on three U-shaped unreinforced stone masonry walls.•Ambient vibration testing of masonry wall specimens.•Out-of-plane damage limits for masonry wall specimens were determined. In stone masonry buildings, failure under strong ground motions usually occurs in the form of out-of-plane overturning of the walls before reaching their in-plane strength, as the walls have long unsupported spans perpendicular to their plane and the lack of slabs ensuring a diaphragm effect. Post-earthquake damage observations reveal this specific weakness of the historic masonry walls. Experimental determination of the out-of-plane damage limits of these walls, emerges as a need for use, especially during numerical evaluations. This article presents the results of static and dynamic testing of double- and three-leaf large-scale U-shaped masonry wall specimens. For this purpose, nondestructive material characterization was conducted on a reference historical masonry structure. Large-scale wall specimens were designed considering these findings and material tests performed on mortar samples. Quasi-static cyclic tests and ambient vibration tests for both initial and damaged conditions were performed on these specimens to capture the damage evolution and the corresponding drift limits. Damage limits are suggested to be used in performance-based evaluations of other territorial structures.