• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.57 no.4
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• pp.641-656
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• 2016

Reinforced concrete frame buildings with masonry infill walls are one of the most popular structural systems in the world. In most cases, the effects of masonry infill walls are not considered in structural models. The results of earthquakes show that infill walls have a significant effect on the seismic response of buildings. In some cases, the buildings collapsed as a result of the formation of a soft story. This study developed a simple method, called corner opening, by replacing the corner of infill walls with a very flexible material to enhance the structural behavior of walls. To evaluate the proposed method a series of experiments were conducted on masonry infill wall and reinforced concrete frames with and without corner openings. Two 1:4 scale masonry infill walls with and without corner openings were tested under diagonal tension or shear strength and two RC frames with full infill walls and with corner opening infill walls were tested under monotonic horizontal loading up to a drift level of 2.5%. The experimental results revealed that the proposed method reduced the strength of infill wall specimens but considerably enhanced the ductility of infill wall specimens in the diagonal tension test. Moreover, the corner opening in infill walls prevented the slid shear failure of the infill wall in RC frames with infill walls.

• Computers and Concrete
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• v.12 no.5
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• pp.681-695
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• 2013

In 1999 Marmara and 2011 Van earthquakes in Turkey, majority of the existing buildings either sustained severe damage or collapsed. These buildings include masonry infill walls in both the interior and exterior R/C frames. The material of the masonry infill is the main variant, ranging from natural stones to bricks and blocks. It is demanding to design these buildings for satisfactory structural behavior. In general, masonry infill walls are considered by its weights not by interaction between walls and frames. In this study, R/C buildings with infill walls are considered in terms of structural behavior. Therefore, 5 and 8-story R/C buildings are regarded as the representative models in the analyses. The R/C representative buildings, both with and without infill walls were analyzed to determine the effects of structural behavior change. The differences in earthquake behavior of these representative buildings were investigated to determine the effects of infill walls leading structural capacity. First, pushover curves of the representative buildings were sketched. Aftermath, time history analyses were carried out to define the displacement demands. Finally, fragility analyses were performed. Throughout the fragility analyses, probabilistic seismic assessment for R/C building structures both with and without infill walls were provided. In this study, besides the deterministic assessment methodology, a probabilistic approach was followed to define structural effect of infill walls under seismic loads.

• Computers and Concrete
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• v.22 no.5
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• pp.439-447
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• 2018

One of the important factors is the infill walls in the change of the structural rigidity, ductility, dynamic and static characteristics of the structures. The infill walls are not generally included in numerical analysis of reinforced concrete (RC) structural system due to lack of suitable theory and the difficulty of calculating the recommended models. In seismic regions worldwide, the residential structures are generally RC buildings with infill wall. Therefore, understanding the contribution of the infill walls to seismic performance of buildings may have a vital importance. This paper investigates the effects of infill walls on seismic performance of the existing RC residential buildings by considering requirements of the Turkish Earthquake Code (TEC). Seismic performance levels of residential RC buildings with and without walls in high-hazard zones were determined according to the nonlinear procedure given in the code. Pushover curves were obtained by considering the effect of masonry infill walls on seismic performance of RC buildings. The analysis results showed that the infill walls beneficially effected to the rigidity, roof displacements and seismic performance of the building.

• Earthquakes and Structures
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• v.23 no.2
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• pp.151-168
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• 2022

Torsion is one of the most important causes of building collapse during earthquakes. Sometimes, despite the symmetric form of the building, infill walls disturb the symmetry of the lateral resisting system. The purpose of this research is to investigate the effect of urban layout on developing torsion caused by infill walls. For this purpose, a typological study was conducted based on the conditions of perimeter walls on 364 buildings and then 9 cases were selected. The dimensions of the selected buildings are constant and the conditions of the perimeter walls including facades with openings and cantilevered facades are variable. The selected buildings with 60 different layouts of infill walls were analyzed and the behavior of each one was evaluated based on the torsional irregularity criteria of seismic codes. The results of the analyses showed that if the perimeter walls of a building are symmetric, asymmetric interior walls will not be important in developing torsion and effective parameters in symmetry of the perimeter infill walls are the number of walls, area of openings, aspect ratio, and construction details. Finally, architectural solutions to mitigate the torsional effects of infill walls were proposed for buildings with solid infill walls on some sides, for buildings where the perimeter walls of one side are on the cantilevered part, and for buildings where the perimeter walls of two adjacent sides are on the cantilevered part. In three-sided buildings, where two adjacent façades are cantilevered, it is often impossible to use the potential of the infill walls.

• Journal of the Earthquake Engineering Society of Korea
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• v.14 no.5
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• pp.13-22
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• 2010

Masonry infill walls are frequently used as interior partitions and exterior walls in low- or middle- rise RC buildings. In the design and assessment of buildings, the infill walls are usually treated as non-structural elements and they are ignored in analytical models because they are assumed to be beneficial to the structural responses. Therefore, their influences on the structural response are ignored. In the case of buildings constructed in the USA in highly seismic regions, infill walls have a lower strength and stiffness than the boundary frames or they are separated from the boundary frames. Thus, the previously mentioned assumptions may be reasonable. However, these systems are not usually employed in most other countries. Therefore, the differences in the seismic behaviors of RC buildings with/without masonry infill walls, which are ignored in structural design, need to be investigated. In this study, structural analyses were performed for a masonry infilled low-rise RC moment-resisting frame. The infill walls were modeled as equivalent diagonal struts. The seismic behaviors of the RC moment-resisting frame with/without masonry infill walls were evaluated. From the analytical results, masonry infill walls can increase the global strength and stiffness of a structure. Consequently, the interstory drift ratio will decrease but seismic forces applied to the structure will increase more than the design seismic load because the natural period of the structure decreases. Partial damage of the infill walls by the floor causes vertical irregularity of the strength and stiffness.

• Proceedings of the Computational Structural Engineering Institute Conference
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• 2008.04a
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• pp.483-489
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• 2008

Masonry infill walls are frequently used as interior partitions and exterior walls in low- or middlerise RC buildings In the structural design and assessment of structural behaviors of buildings, the infill walls are usually treated as non-structural elements and they are ignored in analytical models. In this study, seismic behaviors of RC frame with/without masonry infill walls were investigated. To this end, the infill walls were modeled as equivalent diagonal struts. Based on analytical results, it has been shown that masonry infill walls can increase the global strength and stiffness of a structure. Accordingly, inter-story drift ratio will be decreased but seismic forces applied to the structure were increased than design seismic load because natural period of the structure was decreased. It is also seen from the analytical results that the inelastic deformation of RC frame with soft story is concentrated on the first story columns and thus, partial damage may have possibility of collapse of system.

• Earthquakes and Structures
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• v.23 no.6
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• pp.527-534
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• 2022

EDCC (Eco-Friendly Ductile Cementitious Composites) is a recently created class of engineered cementitious composites that exhibit extremely high ductility and elastoplastic behavior under pure tension. EDCC contains reduced amounts of cement and very large volumes of fly ash. Due to these properties, EDCC has become one of the solutions to use in seismic upgrading. This paper discloses previous studies and research that discussed the seismic upgrading of unreinforced, non-grouted, unconfined, and non-load bearing masonry walls which are called URM infill walls using the EDCC technique. URM infill wall is one of the weak links in the building structure to withstand the earthquake waves, as the brittle behavior of the URM infill walls behaves poorly during seismic events. The purpose of this study is to fill a knowledge gap about the theoretical and experimental ways to use the EDCC in URM infill walls. The findings reflect the ability of the EDCC to change the behavior from brittle to ductile to a certain percentage behavior, increasing the overall drift before collapse as it increases the energy dissipation, and resists significant shaking under extensive levels with various types and intensities.

• Earthquakes and Structures
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• v.11 no.5
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• pp.887-904
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• 2016

An efficient, economical and practical strengthening method for hollow brick infill walls was proposed and investigated in the present study, experimentally and numerically. This method aims at increasing the overall lateral strength and stiffness of the structure by increasing the contribution of the infill walls and providing the non-bearing components of the structure with the capability of absorbing earthquake-induced energy to minimize structural damage during seismic excitations. A total of eleven full-scale infill walls strengthened with expanded mild steel plates were tested under diagonal monotonic loading to simulate the loading condition of the non-bearing walls during an earthquake. The contact surface between the plates and the wall was increased with the help of plaster. Thickness of the plates bonded to both faces of the wall and the spacing of the bolts were adopted as test parameters. The experiments indicated that the plates were able to carry a major portion of the tensile stresses induced by the diagonal loads and provided the walls walls with a considerable confining effect. The composite action attained by the plates and the wall until yielding of the bolts increased the load capacities, rigidities, ductilities and energy-absorption capacities of the walls, considerably.

• Earthquakes and Structures
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• v.6 no.2
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• pp.181-199
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• 2014

The infill walls, whose contribution to the earthquake resistance of a structure is generally ignored due to their limited lateral rigidities, constitute a part of the lateral load bearing system of an RC frame structure. A common method for improving the earthquake behavior of RC frame structures is increasing the contribution of the infill walls to the overall lateral rigidity by strengthening them through different techniques. The present study investigates the influence of externally bonded perforated steel plates on the load capacities, rigidities, and ductilities of hollow brick infill walls. For this purpose, a reference (unstrengthened) and twelve strengthened specimens were subjected to monotonic diagonal compression. The experiments indicated that the spacing of the bolts, connecting the plates to the wall, have a more profound effect on the behavior of a brick wall compared to the thickness of the strengthening plates. Furthermore, an increase in the plate thickness was shown to result in a considerable improvement in the behavior of the wall only if the plates are connected to the wall with closely-spaced bolts. This strengthening technique was found to increase the energy absorption capacities of the walls between 4 and 14 times the capacity of the reference wall. The strengthened walls reached ultimate loads 30-160% greater than the reference wall and all strengthened walls remained intact till the end of the test.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.74 no.1
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• pp.121-128
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• 2020

This paper presents an experimental study on the dynamic characteristics of infilled reinforced concrete (RC) frames. A 1/3-scaled, one-bay, three-storey RC frame was produced and tested by using operational modal analysis (OMA). The experiments were performed on five specimens: one reference frame with no infill walls and four frames with infill walls. The RC frame systems included infill walls made of hollow clay brick, which were constructed in four different patterns. The dynamic characteristics of the patterns, including the frequency, mode shapes and damping ratios in the in-plane direction, were obtained by 6 accelerometers. Twenty-minute records under ambient vibration were collected for each model, and the dynamic characteristics were determined using the ambient vibration testing and modal identification software (ARTeMIS). The experimental studies showed that the infill walls significantly affected the frequency value, rigidity and damping ratio of the RC frame system.