Recently, the construction of interlocking mortarless masonry walls as infill panels and/or architectural space partitions has been widely grown in South Africa, East and South Asia due to significant construction speed, reduction of labour cost, easy alignment and environmental friendliness. These innovative construction elements can be used as an appropriate alternative to traditional mortared masonry walls. This paper presents an in-depth seismic performance investigation of different interlocking masonry wall types, including Putra, Tanzanian, Thai, Solbric and Hydraform under lateral load by nonlinear static analysis in earthquake-prone areas. To this end, numerical models of interlocking walls were established in ABAQUS finite element package through micro-scale modeling technique. Then they were validated under the combination of in-plane loading and afterward their seismic capacities were evaluated using pushover method. Furthermore, based on the Iranian seismic design code, the performance of interlocking walls was assessed by inelastic demand spectrum for 475 years return period earthquake. Results revealed that the seismic performance of the interlocking mortarless walls strongly depends on the intensity of vertical load and inelastic response spectra. It was also found that by applying typical surcharge vertical load, just the interlocking walls restricted horizontally and transversely (first group) can be used in low seismicity areas (0.2 g) in all cases.
