Infilled masonry can be seen as an old research issue, but recent seismic activities, such as the
2009 Aquila earthquake in Italy, showed seismic engineers and structural designers that
current infill solutions may not work as expected. In this seismic action, the analysis of the
damages in buildings constructed in the last 20 years, designed according to modern
standards, may lead to the worrying conclusion that the design Limit States were not fulfilled.
Taking this into account, a research program was conducted as a partnership between the
University of Minho, Portugal, and the National Laboratory for Civil Engineering (L.N.E.C.),
Portugal, which included a shaking table experimental program. The objective of this program
was to study the seismic behaviour of the most common infill solution in Portugal, the
unreinforced double leaf clay brick masonry, and two reinforced solutions referenced in the
standard Eurocode 8: i) single leaf clay brick with bed joint reinforcement, connected to the
bounding frame; ii) single leaf clay brick with steel net in the plaster, connected to the
bounding frame. The present paper details the first two tested solutions, along with the
discussion of the results, focusing on the obtained collapse modes of the infills and the
measured accelerations for those modes
