Although, confined masonry structures have been widely used masonry construction
systems in some countries, most of them have been constructed as to be plain masonry
in Turkey. In the confined system, all of the load-bearing walls are to confine all sides
with horizontal and vertical confining elements. In engineering literature, reference to
confined masonry system modeling and analysis has been rare in Turkey. But according
to the Turkish Earthquake Code, only the confined masonry buildings are given
permission to build. The purpose of this study is selected as to investigate the effects of
confining elements on out-of-plane behavior of bearing walls with numerical method.
For this purpose, the confining systems of masonry construction are briefly presented
and some requirements given in specifications are discussed. Then a number of different
confinement configurations for the masonry walls are modeled and subjected to out of
plane performance. Finite element method was used for the modeling and Drucker-
Prager yield criterion was selected to consider nonlinear material properties in the
analyses. Finally results and conclusions taken from out-of-plane behaviors of the
masonry walls with different confining elements configurations were presented.