• Proceedings of the Computational Structural Engineering Institute Conference
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• 2008.04a
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• pp.483-489
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• 2008

Masonry infill walls are frequently used as interior partitions and exterior walls in low- or middlerise RC buildings In the structural design and assessment of structural behaviors of buildings, the infill walls are usually treated as non-structural elements and they are ignored in analytical models. In this study, seismic behaviors of RC frame with/without masonry infill walls were investigated. To this end, the infill walls were modeled as equivalent diagonal struts. Based on analytical results, it has been shown that masonry infill walls can increase the global strength and stiffness of a structure. Accordingly, inter-story drift ratio will be decreased but seismic forces applied to the structure were increased than design seismic load because natural period of the structure was decreased. It is also seen from the analytical results that the inelastic deformation of RC frame with soft story is concentrated on the first story columns and thus, partial damage may have possibility of collapse of system.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.76 no.3
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• pp.421-433
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• 2020

Masonry infills are normally considered as non-structural elements in design practice, therefore, the interaction between the bounding frame and the strength contribution of masonry infills is commonly ignored in the seismic analysis work of the RC frames. However, a number of typical RC frames with irregular distributed masonry infills have suffered from undesirable weak-story failure in major earthquakes, which indicates that ignoring the influence of masonry infills may cause great seismic collapse risk of RC frames. This paper presented the investigation on the risk of seismic collapse of RC frames with irregularly distributed masonry infills through a large number of nonlinear time history analyses (NTHAs). Based on the results of NTHAs, seismic fragility curves were developed for RC frames with various distribution patterns of masonry infills. It was found that the existence of masonry infills generally reduces the collapse risk of the RC frames under both frequent happened and very strong earthquakes, however, the severe irregular distribution of masonry infills, such as open ground story scenario, results in great risk of forming a weak story failure. The strong-column weak-beam (SCWB) ratio has been widely adopted in major seismic design codes to control the potential of weak story failures, where a SCWB ratio value about 1.2 is generally accepted as the lower limit. In this study, the effect of SCWB ratio on inter-story drift distribution was also parametrically investigated. It showed that improving the SCWB ratio of the RC frames with irregularly distributed masonry infills can reduce inter-story drift concentration index under earthquakes, therefore, prevent weak story failures. To achieve the same drift concentration index limit of the bare RC frame with SCWB ratio of about 1.2, which is specified in ACI318-14, the SCWB ratio of masonry-infilled RC frames should be no less than 1.5. For the open ground story scenario, this value can be as high as 1.8.

• Earthquakes and Structures
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• v.8 no.1
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• pp.19-35
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• 2015

This study compares the seismic performances of two reinforced concrete frame specimens tested by the pseudo-dynamic procedure. The pair of 3-storey, 3-bay frames specimens are constructed with typical characteristics of older construction which is lacking seismic design. One of the specimens is a bare frame while the other is infilled with low-strength autoclave aerated concrete (AAC) block masonry. The focus of this study is to investigate the influence of low strength masonry infill walls on the seismic response of older RC frames designed for gravity loads. It is found that the presence of weak infill walls considerably reduce deformations and damage in the upper stories while their influence at the critical ground story is not all that positive. Infill walls tend to localize damage at the critical story due to a peculiar frame-infill interaction, and impose larger internal force and deformation demands on the columns and beams bounding the infills. Therefore the general belief in earthquake engineering that infills develop a second line of defence against lateral forces in seismically deficient frames is nullified in case of low-strength infill walls in the presented experimental research.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.44 no.6
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• pp.763-774
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• 2012

Reinforced concrete frame structures with masonry infill walls constitute the significant portion of the building stock in Turkey. Therefore it is very important to understand the behavior of masonry infill frame structures under earthquake loads. This study presents an experimental work performed on reinforced concrete (RC) frames with different types of masonry infills, namely standard and locked bricks. Earthquake effects are induced on the RC frames by quasi-static tests. Results obtained from different frames are compared with each other through various stiffness, strength, and energy related parameters. It is shown that locked bricks may prove useful in decreasing the problems related to horizontal and vertical irregularities defined in building codes. Moreover tests show that locked brick infills maintain their integrity up to very high drift levels, showing that they may have a potential in reducing injuries and fatalities related to falling hazards during severe ground shakings.

• Journal of the Earthquake Engineering Society of Korea
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• v.24 no.1
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• pp.39-47
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• 2020

Lightly reinforced concrete (RC) moment frames may suffer significant damage during large earthquake events. Most buildings with RC moment frames were designed without considering seismic loads. The load-displacement response of gravity load designed frames could be altered by masonry infill walls. The objective of this study is to investigate the load-displacement response of gravity load designed frames with masonry infill walls. For this purpose, three-story gravity load designed frames with masonry infill walls were considered. The masonry infilled RC frames demonstrated larger lateral strength and stiffness than bare RC frames, whereas their drift capacity was less than that of bare frames. A specimen with a partial-height infill wall showed the least drift capacity and energy dissipation capacity. This specimen failed in shear, whereas other specimens experienced a relatively ductile failure mode (flexure-shear failure).

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.61 no.5
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• pp.663-674
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• 2017

The determination of the fundamental period of vibration of a structure is essential to earthquake design. Current codes provide formulas for the approximate estimation of the fundamental period of earthquake-resistant building systems. These formulas are dependent only on the height of the structure or number of storeys without taking into account the presence of infill walls into the structure, despite the fact that infill walls increase the stiffness and mass of the structure leading to significant changes in the fundamental period. Furthermore, such a formulation is overly conservative and unable to account for structures with geometric irregularities. In this study, which comprises the companion paper of previous published research by the authors, the effect of the vertical geometric irregularities on the fundamental periods of masonry infilled structures has been investigated, through a large set of infilled frame structure cases. Based on these results, an attempt to quantify the reduction of the fundamental period due to the vertical geometric irregularities has been made through a proposal of properly reduction factor.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.54 no.6
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• pp.1175-1200
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• 2015

This paper investigates the fundamental period of vibration of RC buildings by means of finite element macro-modelling and modal eigenvalue analysis. As a base study, a number of 14-storey RC buildings have been considered "according to code designed" and "according to code non-designed". Several parameters have been studied including the number of spans; the span length in the direction of motion; the stiffness of the infills; the percentage openings of the infills and; the location of the soft storeys. The computed values of the fundamental period are compared against those obtained from seismic code and equations proposed by various researchers in the literature. From the analysis of the results it has been found that the span length, the stiffness of the infill wall panels and the location of the soft storeys are crucial parameters influencing the fundamental period of RC buildings.

• Proceedings of the Korea Concrete Institute Conference
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• 2005.11a
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• pp.129-132
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• 2005

The primary purpose of this investigation is to find out the shear behavior and the shear capacity of RC bare frames, brick-infilled RC frames, and damper-retrofitted RC frames and to evaluate the average shear strength of brick--infill wall. The main variables art the absence of brick infill wall and steel plate slit damper. The test results show that the shear capacity of specimen IF-DR is 2.8 times as high as that of the specimen BF and it presents the fact that the retrofitting effect and the possibility of RC frame reuse with changing the slit damper is verified. And the average shear strength of the brick infill wall is figured to be at $5.0 kgf/cm^2$.

• Earthquakes and Structures
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• v.18 no.4
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• pp.437-449
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• 2020

It is quite apparent that engineering concerns related to the influence of masonry infills on seismic behavior of reinforced concrete (RC) structures is likely to remain relevant in the long term, as infill walls maintain their functionalities in construction practice. Within this framework, the present paper mainly deals with the issue in terms of modal expansion of effective earthquake forces and the resultant modal responses. An adequate determination of spatial distribution of effective earthquake forces over the height of the building is highly essential for both seismic analysis and design. The possible influence of infill walls is investigated by means of modal analyses of two-, three-, and four-bay RC frames with a number of stories ranging from 3 to 8. Both uniformly and non-uniformly infilled frames are considered in numerical analyses, where infill walls are simulated by adopting the model of equivalent compression strut. Consequently, spatial distribution of effective earthquake forces, modal static base shear force response of frames, modal responses of story shears from external excitation vector and lateral floor displacements are obtained. It is found that, infill walls and their arrangement over the height of the frame structure affect the spatial distribution of modal inertia forces, as well as the considered response quantities. Moreover, the amount of influence varies in stories, but is not very dependent to bay number of frames.

• Journal of the Computational Structural Engineering Institute of Korea
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• v.28 no.3
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• pp.293-300
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• 2015

In this study, a series of forced vibration testing and ambient vibration measurement were performed at a lowrise masonry-infilled reinforced concrete frame structure before and after seismic retrofit and its dynamic properties were extracted using system identification techniques. Also, analytical models which show similar dynamic properties to the measures ones were constructed. The system identification results showed that damping ratios in x direction along which the dampers were installed has been increased. From the comparison between the analytical models, the effective stiffness of post-installed member and post-reinforced members(shear walls and damper frames) were only 50% of gross sectional stiffness of the members, which indicates that the these members were not fully integrated with the existing structure or members. In addition, support condition of post-installed footing has to be pinned in y direction to match the dynamic properties, which is seemingly caused by the change of fixity of the soil due to the installation of new footing.