Abstract
Masonry-Infilled Reinforced Concrete Frames are a very widespread structural typology all over the world for civil, strategic or productive uses. The damages due to these masonry panels can be life threatening to humans and can severely impact economic losses, as shown during past earthquakes. In fact, during a seismic event, most victims are caused by the collapse of buildings or due to nonstructural elements. The damage caused by an earthquake on nonstructural elements, i.e., those not belonging to the actual structural body of the building, is important for the purposes of a more general description of the effects and, of course, for economic estimates. In fact, after an earthquake, albeit of a low entity, it is very frequent to find even widespread damages of nonstructural elements causing major inconveniences even if the primary structure has reported minor damages. In recent years, many territories have been hit worldwide by strong seismic sequences, which caused widespread damages to the nonstructural elements and in particular to the masonry internal partitions and the masonry infill panels of the buildings in reinforced concrete, with damage to the floor and out-of-plane expulsions/collapses of single layers. Unfortunately, these critical issues have arisen not only in historic, but also in recent buildings with reinforced concrete, in many cases exhibiting inadequate seismic behavior, only partly attributable to the intrinsic vulnerability of the masonry panels against seismic actions. Such problems are due to the following aspects: lack of attention to construction details in the realization of the construction, use of poor-quality materials, and above all lack of design tools for the infill masonry walls. In 2018, regarding the design of nonstructural elements, the formulation of floor spectra has been recently introduced in Italy. This entry article wants to focus on all these aspects, describing the state of the art, the literature studies and the design problems to be solved.
Highlights
In the complex of a building, are distinguished load-bearing and non-load-bearing elements. The former constitute the structure of the building and they are entrusted with the task of transmitting the vertical and horizontal actions acting on the building
The structure is composed ofof four branches actions and takes into various states of stress: Evenbehavior when product standards are available, there are few nonstructural elements for (a) initial of the noncracked panel; (b) post-cracked linear response, characterized which the seismic problem is resolved regulatory of level
The fundamental role played by nonstructural elements in terms of safety and maintenance of functionality of buildings is unanimously recognized
Summary
In the complex of a building, are distinguished load-bearing and non-load-bearing elements. On the basis of this description, it is easy to understand how, by its nature, the infill wall is not conceived as an element capable of fulfilling a load-bearing function, which is why it is often neglected from a structural point of view: the less attentive designers, deal with the design of the load-bearing elements (beams, pillars, curbs, floors, etc.), completely forgetting that these structural elements, during the useful life of the work, will have to collaborate with other nonstructural elements, such as curtain walls, and that the presence of these will necessarily influence it. Another thing is the negligence of rearend collisions with respect to horizontal actions, in particular from the stresses deriving from seismic events
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