Based on the nonlinear static analysis and the approximate seismic evaluation method adopted in “Guidelines for seismic performance evaluation for existing buildings, two methods to calculate strength demand for retrofitting individual structural walls in unreinforced masonry buildings are proposed.” The displacement coefficient method to determine displacement demand from nonlinear static analysis results is used for the inverse calculation of overall strength demand required to reduce the displacement demand to a target value meeting the performance objective of the unreinforced masonry building to retrofit. A preliminary seismic evaluation method to screen out vulnerable buildings, of which detailed evaluation is necessary, is utilized to calculate overall strength demand without structural analysis based on the difference between the seismic demand and capacity. A system modification factor is introduced to the preliminary seismic evaluation method to reduce the strength demand considering inelastic deformation. The overall strength demand is distributed to the structural walls to retrofit based on the wall stiffness, including the remaining walls or otherwise. Four detached residential houses are modeled and analyzed using the nonlinear static and preliminary evaluation procedures to examine the proposed method.

Nonlinear static analysis and preliminary evaluation were performed in this study to evaluate the seismic performance of unreinforced masonry buildings subjected to various soil conditions based on the revised Korean Building Code. Preliminary evaluation scores and nonlinear static analyses indicated that all buildings were susceptible to collapse and did not reach their target performance. Therefore, retrofit of those building models was carried out through a systematic procedure to determine areas to be strengthened. It was possible to make most building models satisfy performance objectives through the reinforcement alone of damaged external shear walls. However, the application of a preliminary evaluation procedure to retrofit design was found to be too conservative because all the retrofitted building models verified with nonlinear static analysis failed to satisfy performance objectives. Therefore, it is possible to economically retrofit unreinforced masonry buildings through the fortification of external walls if a simple evaluation procedure that can efficiently specify vulnerable parts is developed.