Summary
Past earthquakes had shown vulnerability of infill walls especially under out of plane (OOP) loading. Although some new infill walls show a good OOP performance, generally, they do not have the right economic justification or have complexity in construction. Therefore, in this paper, an innovative economical infill wall is presented that is not complicated in construction. The proposed wall constructed by light expanded clay aggregate in especial shape that reinforced with side plates, top, and bottom rebars. Experimental and numerical studies were carried out to investigate its seismic performance. Experimental results showed a high continuity between blocks of wall due to its especial shape that is increased ultimate OOP strength and ultimate OOP displacement of the wall. Numerical results indicated, because the infill wall is isolated from boundary frame, no drift is imposed to infill wall from boundary frame. Therefore, the infill wall only suffered OOP seismic acceleration. Due to light weight of the infill wall, low OOP load that corresponds to seismic acceleration is applied to the infill wall. In the infill wall, no separation is made even up to drift frame of 2.5%. The relations to design of the proposed infill wall were also presented.