Abstract:Earthquake experience indicates that the buildings of the countryside have sustained more serious damage and destruction than city buildings during recent earthquakes in China.A main reason is that rural buildings have not been strictly designed and constructed according to codes.The Code for Seismic Design of Buildings has been under development for fifty years in China,but it has been given few chances to guide building construction at the countryside's lower economic level.Rural buildings have been constructed by the owners themselves and lack basic earthquake provisions,causing rural buildings to be easily damaged during earthquakes.For this reason,some measures have been proposed in recent years for improving the seismic performance of rural buildings.But most earthquake guidelines have not been verified by building model experiments or actual earthquake experiences.Fortunately,as numerical simulation skills develop,it is becoming possible to simulate the entire earthquake response process for a building.This study proposed a numerical dynamic inelastic earthquake response model for a single-story unreinforced masonry building,using the ABAQUS program.Three levels of earthquake provision were considered:(1) the unreinforced masonry building,with no reinforced concrete(RC) tie columns or RC tie beams;(2) the unreinforced masonry building,including RC tie columns and RC tie beams;(3) the masonry building with reinforced steel in the corners and joints between the horizontal wall and the longitudinal wall and including RC tie columns and RC tie beams.Concrete damaged plasticity was used to represent the behavior of the masonry wall.Masonry in compression was modeled as an elastic-plastic material,and the stress-strain behavior of concrete in compression was assumed to be linear elastic.The earthquake response processes of the three models were simulated from the record of the Wenchuan earthquake,located in Wen County of GanSu province.The analysis results indicated that the numerical method is a better tool for simulating the masonry building earthquake response process.The earthquake measures are very important for improving buildings in the countryside.