Paper
The Effect of Infill Wall Collapse on the Deformation Estimations of Reinforced Concrete Frames
- Authors:
- U?ur Akp?nar; Bar?? Binici
- Abstract
- Infill walls are generally used as partition walls in structural systems. Their contributions to stiffness and strength during earthquakes are often neglected in the design of new buildings. 1999 Kocaeli, 2003 Bingol and 2011 Van earthquakes in Turkey revealed that the presence of infill walls may significantly affect the vulnerability of structures depending on failure of walls in first stories and formation of soft story mechanism. Since the building stock in Turkey is mostly composed of reinforced concrete frame buildings with masonry infill walls, simulation of building collapse under seismic loads becomes an important issue. In this paper, the failure mechanisms of the infill walls were numerically simulated by integrating an element removal algorithm to the traditional diagonal strut models. The possible unfavourable effects of infill walls on the reinforced concrete structures were investigated under the earthquake loads. For this purpose, a 4-story 3-bay deficient reinforced concrete frame with infill walls was examined and the results were compared with those of the bare frame. 7.4 magnitudes 1999 Duzce earthquake was used as the ground motion record in the nonlinear time history analyses. The analysis results indicated that including infill wall collapse in analyses resulted in large deformation demands, sudden stiffness degradations and formation of a soft story. These detrimental damage events were not observed when the presence of infill walls was neglected.
- Keywords
- RC Frames; Infill Walls; Nonlinear Analyses; Soft-Story; Element Removing
- StartPage
- 171
- EndPage
- 177
- Doi