Performance Evaluation of Masonry Infill Walls in Reinforced Concrete Frames Under Cyclic Loading Using Applied Element Method

Abstract

Open ground storey in Reinforced concrete framed buildings is considered to be the most vulnerable when it is subjected to dynamic excitation because of the formation of column sway mechanism and then leads to sudden failure of the ground storey. They must be avoided in severe earthquake zones. Many of the researcher’s done experiments for the cause of failure in the ground storey and recommended increasing the stiffness and strength in the soft storey for the lateral load resistance by adding a non-structural element such as Masonry infill walls on all sides of the building. It is very complex to study RC frames’ behaviour with Masonry infill walls because of different material properties. Numerical tool viz., Finite Element Method used for such complex structural behaviour requires more time for simulation and accuracy is quite acceptable but deviate from the experimental results. For this reason, a powerful numerical tool such as the Applied Element Method (AEM) has been considered. In this paper, one bay-one storey and two bay-two storey half-scale RC frames with and without infill walls under in-plane cyclic loading have been modelled using AEM. In conclusion, the results of AEM models have been compared with experimental results done by researchers. The obtained AEM results are well accepted with experimental results. The study showed that the stiffness, lateral load resistance and strength were improved for masonry infilled RC frame, compared with bare RC frame in both Single-storey and Multi-storied frames.