Abstract
Following the strong earthquake on April 25, 2015 in Nepal, a team from the University of Porto, in collaboration with other international institutions, made a field study on some of the most affected areas in the capital region of Kathmandu. One of the tasks was the study of a high-rise settle of buildings that were damaged following the earthquake sequence. A survey damage assessment was performed to a 15-storey infilled reinforced concrete structure, which will be detailed in the manuscript. Moreover, ambient vibration tests were carried out to determine the natural frequencies and corresponding vibration modes of the structure. The main aim of this manuscript is to present a numerical study concerning the influence of the masonry infill walls in the structure seismic response. For this, three numerical models were built discriminating the situations with and without damage and nondamaged infill walls. Validation and calibration of the numerical model was ensured by comparing the numerical frequencies with those obtained from ambient vibration tests. In addition, linear elastic analyses were carried out, using real accelerograms from the Gorkha earthquake to assess and quantify the major differences between the models in terms of inter-storey drifts ratios, inter-storey shear forces and seismic loadings.
Highlights
Recent earthquakes demonstrated that the masonry infill walls have an important contribution in the seismic response of the reinforced concrete (RC) structures
The section aims to detail modelling strategies adopted within this work.ofThus, willpresent start with the description of RC the structural members modelling and the modelling the it will start with the description of structural members modelling and the modelling of the nonstructural elements. 3D numerical models were built in the software SAP2000 [13]
This can be justified by the irregularity of the damages observed in the infill masonry walls, which reduced the global lateral stiffness and strength and increased the lateral deformation; (iii) From the comparison between all the numerical models, it can be observed that Model 1 reached the highest inter-storey drift (ISD) ratio values along the direction X, by achieving a maximum value of 0.85%
Summary
With the aim to assess the effect of the presence of infill walls in the structural response of the building, linear elastic dynamic analyses were carried out. Since this specific study is not related to the seismic vulnerability assessment of the structure, it was intended to perform only one dynamic linear elastic analysis with only one accelerogram for all the three numerical models. (with undamaged infills) is the one closest to this range of natural periods (T = 1.25 s) This indicates that Model 2 will be the one subjected to higher seismic loading demands in this analysis
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