Design Proposal for Masonry Infill Walls Subject to Seismic Actions

Several factors influence the behaviour of masonry infilled frames, which have been the subject of previous research with moderate success. The new generation of European design standards imposes the need to prevent the brittle collapse of infills and makes the structural engineer accountable for this requirement, yet it fails to provide sufficient information for masonry infill design. The present study aimed to compare experimental results with the provisions of the standard for the computation of the demand and capacity of infilled frames. Three reinforced concrete buildings with different infill solutions were constructed at a 1:1.5 scale. The infill walls were tested until collapse, or severe damage, using the shake table of the National Laboratory for Civil Engineering, Portugal, and their response was measured using accelerometers attached to the walls. The European normative standard provides results close to the experimental ones as far as demand and capacity are concerned. Based on the experiments, two design proposals for infill walls are presented here, one for the definition of the natural frequency of the infills, and another for a reduction factor to account for the presence of openings in the out-of-plane capacity of infills.

Numerical Study of the In-Plane Seismic Response of RC Infilled Frames

Reinforced Concrete (RC) buildings with masonry infills are a very common structural typology worldwide for civil, strategic, or productive use. Damage to infills may cause danger for human lives and strongly affects economic losses, as shown during past earthquakes. In the current literature, different approaches are available for modeling the in-plane response of infilled frames and different constitutive laws generally calibrated on experimental tests. On the contrary, few and recent studies proposed formulas that account for the main properties of infills influencing their in-plane behavior to lateral forces. This paper presents a study finalized to derive a reliable model that is able to predict the monotonic and cyclic response of RC infilled masonry frames. To this end, after a critical analysis of the available literature, the authors combine among them two models, one for the monotonic response and the other for the cyclic one, by showing their reliability with reference to different experimental cases. Then, at the end of the paper, the derived models are employed to assess the seismic vulnerability of infills throughout a proposed procedure based on the common pushover analysis approach.