1st Croatian Conference on Earthquake Engineering 1CroCEE 2021

Recent events in Croatia revealed the high vulnerability of traditional unreinforced masonry chimney systems even in the case of moderate earthquakes. Chimney systems are non-structural elements and thus there is a lack of knowledge and research in this field. This topic has been in the focus of our research group through a recently finished two-stage research project oriented towards the optimization of contemporary masonry chimney systems. The main goal of the first part of the project was to experimentally identify overall behavior and main performance limits for the typical contemporary chimney systems when exposed to cyclic lateral loading. In the second part of the project, significant improvement of the behavior of the optimized system was achieved. However, since in the case of seismic loading there is significant coupling action between primary structure and non-structural elements, for the evaluation of conclusions additional numerical study was needed. It was done on detached typical masonry family house considering the floor acceleration spectra, coupling effect between primary structure and chimney, and the latest design provisions from the approaching second generation of Eurocode 8 for non-structural elements. In the end, the results are compared and discussed.