Dear friends,

Tabique walls are walls made of wood and are rather common in old buildings which should be regarded, for the sake of this dissertation, as buildings which withhold typically resistant walls of stone masonry and wooden floors, built using traditional techniques and local materials. Though they are mostly partition walls, they frequently act structurally both because of the characteristics of the buildings and the time-related degradation of structural elements. An example may be tabique walls transversally positioned under the beams of a pavement which, due to degradation and/or fluidity, ends up leaning on those walls, conferring them structural functions.

Not only on account of these reasons but also because they are part of a rather valuable technical, material and cultural building process it is very important to learn about the mechanical and performance characteristics of these walls in order to guarantee their safety and promote their preservation in a sustained way in building rehabilitation.

The target of this thesis is to enhance the knowledge of the mechanical characteristics of tabique walls and more specifically to evaluate the experimental behaviour of these reduced thickness wooden walls when subject to horizontal actions, thus assessing their role in the performance of the constructions where they exist. Therefore, it begins with the characterization of two types of tabique walls particularly abundant in old buildings in Portugal: simple and double tabique walls, i.e., with a line of vertical planks or with a second line of diagonal planks overlapping the former. Afterwards, a testing campaign to the cut in the plane with constant compression on a set of 4 types of simple tabique walls and 4 of double tabique, representative of 8 full-scale walls without plaster coating. These walls had been previously submitted to simple compression tests as part of another trial.

Analysing the outcome enabled not only achieving the ultimate objective of the thesis, in other words, understanding the cut performance of tried types of tabique walls, but also calibrating a numerical model built by other subjects for behaviour simulation of these walls to simple compression and to horizontal actions.

KEYWORDS: Rehabilitation, Tabique construction, Partition walls, Experimental behaviour, Shear