Abstract
Infill walls are the most common separator panels in typical reinforced-concrete (RC) frame structures. It is crucial to investigate the influence of the infill walls on the earthquake behavior of RC frames. The load resistance of infill materials was often not taken into account in the designing phase, whereas the infill walls have significant contributions to the structural behavior under lateral and vertical loadings. A three-dimensional 4-story RC building is designed, and in order to make a realistic model, different infill walls configurations were taken into account with the openings in the infill. Four different models were created for structural analysis for infill wall effects, namely, full RC infilled frame (Model I), corner infill at ground story RC infilled frame (Model II), open ground story RC infilled frame (Model III), and bare RC frame (Model IV). Static adaptive pushover analysis has been performed for all structural models by using the SeismoStruct software. The double strut nonlinear cyclic model was used for modeling the infill walls. In this study, three different compressive strengths of infill walls are taken into consideration, and the effects on seismic design factors (namely, the response reduction factor, the ductility, the overstrength factor, and the deflection factor) are calculated. The obtained values of the response reduction factor (R) are compared with the given values in the BIS code. The results show that the R factors of all RC infilled frames are decreased when the compressive strength of the masonry infill reduces. However, the R values of bare frames are less than the corresponding values recommended in the BIS code. It is worth noting that the National Earthquake Hazards Reduction Program (NEHRP) provisions underestimate the deflection factors of the reinforced-concrete (RC) frames according to the evaluated deflection factors of the herein studied RC frames.
Highlights
In developing countries, the model of multilevel reinforcedconcrete (RC) frames with infill walls is the most popular type used in housing and business constructions [1, 2]
(3) e ductility and ductility reduction factors are higher in the open ground story RC infilled frames as compared to all other frames because the yield displacement point is minimal compared to all other frames due to high stiffness
As the compressive strength of masonry infill reduces, the ductility is slightly reduced in the open ground story RC infilled frames because the change in stiffness between ground and other stories is minimal
Summary
The model of multilevel reinforcedconcrete (RC) frames with infill walls is the most popular type used in housing and business constructions [1, 2]. Erefore, the “frameinfill” interaction in earthquake-prone areas is one of the most important parameters in RC structures. In this context, a great deal of research work has been done on the infill in. RC frames as a result of improvement in computational and experimental methods [15,16,17,18]. In these studies, the effects of different parameters on infill were examined. E earthquake behavior of a 5-story RC existing building in the city of Madinah due to the different infill configurations in the frames was presented by Alguhane et al [19]. Structural analyses were performed using four different infill wall models according to ASCE 4106 [20]. ey evaluated the response modulation coefficient from the capacity design spectra for all structural models
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