Parametric study of the masonry infills' effect on the seismic performance of R/C frames based on the use of different damage measures

摘要

The present paper constitutes an analytical study on the seismic behaviour of infilled reinforced concrete frames within the context of the Performance Based Earthquake Engineering. For this aim, a large number of planar reinforced concrete frames with different structural systems, storeys number, masonry infills' distributions and mechanical properties are studied. Non-linear dynamic analysis is used to simulate the seismic behaviour of the frames against a suite of appropriately chosen earthquake records, scaled to ten different seismic intensity level. The quantitative assessment of the seismic behaviour of each frame is accomplished by means of several different damage measures. Subsequently, these results are meticulously interpreted to assess the overall infill effect on the seismic behaviour of the frames. The results of the research study demonstrate that the infill effect depends greatly on specific characteristics of the main bearing structure and the infill walls. Moreover, the relation between these characteristics and the seismic performance of the infilled frames is found to be consistent across all the frames under investigation and quantifiable. Aggregated results show that certain types of low-rise frames are prone to the adverse infill effect, even with infills of regular distribution, while other frame types are able to benefit from the presence of masonry infills.