Abstract
As non-structural elements, the traditional solid (TS) infills have been in full contact with surrounding frames during earthquakes, inducing considerable structural and elemental damage. To mitigate unfavourable infill-frame interactions, a novel infilled frame with the improved flexible connection (IFC) is proposed. The core is to arrange the infill-frame gaps and adopt tie-belts, which are embedded in the infill mortar joints and have in-plane (IP) deformability, to maintain the infill's out-of-plane (OOP) stability. To investigate IFC infills' OOP performance, a series of infilled frame specimens were fabricated for OOP quasi-static tests. The results showed that the IFC infills with S3-type tie-belts fully developed the arching effect with high OOP barring capacity and ductility. Subsequently, the validated FE modelling was applied to building prototypes with IFC/TS infills, respectively, to conduct elasto-plastic analyses. The results showed that the employment of IFC walls avoided the structural stiffness increase and infills' IP-OOP coupling damage stemmed from TS walls.
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