Abstract
In the last few decades, important attention was given to infill masonry panels due to their worldwide uses. Many experimental and numerical studies were conducted to study their effect on the behavior of RC frames. In general, three modeling strategies are widely applied to model infill masonry, namely, micro-models, meso-models, and macro-models. This study investigates the accuracy of the width models to predict the behavior of masonry infills using the meso-modeling technique. To this aim, the masonry infills are modeled as an equivalent homogenized diagonal element in order to represent the diagonal action of masonry infills. The width models used to determine the width of the diagonal strut are used in meso-modeling. In addition, the study contains comparisons between different modeling techniques to predict the global behavior of the infilled frames. Experimental tests conducted on two infilled frames from the literature are considered to calibrate the numerical simulations. The results indicate that the micro-modeling approach gives a good agreement with the experimental tests in terms of lateral force and deformation shapes, the related errors varying between 0.12 and 2.8%. Using single strut models, the differences between numerical and experimental results vary from 1.1 to 20%. On the other hand, the errors obtained from multiple strut models are varying between 9 and 40%.
Highlights
Infill masonry panels are used worldwide for reinforced concrete buildings
The results are compared in terms of maximum force (Fmax), initial stiffness (Kin), and stiffness at the peak load (Kpeak), where the initial stiffness is defined at 45% of the maximum load
This work contains a numerical investigation on the accuracy of width strut models using meso-modeling
Summary
Infill masonry panels are used worldwide for reinforced concrete buildings. This heterogeneous material is used for internal and external separations, which provide thermal and acoustic insulation. Quinteros et al (2012) used the homogenization technique proposed by Lopez et al (1999), which is based on the periodic unit cell, to study the behavior of masonry walls subjected to a combination of in-plane and out-of-plane loads. The first appearance of this technique is established based on the observation made by Polyakove (1957) [as reported by Furtado et al (2015)] who observed during a series of experimental tests on infilled steel frames that the infills behave as a compression element in a diagonal direction when the surrounding frame is subjected to lateral in-plane forces. The first main contribution proposed in this study is the use of the meso-modeling approach to investigate the accuracy of several width models proposed in the literature To this aim, the masonry infills are modeled as an equivalent homogenized diagonal element. The deformation shape obtained from the micro-modeling is compared to that of the experimental
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