Seismic evaluation of reinforced concrete structures infilled with masonry infill walls

The current research work aims to investigate the seismic performance of the reinforced concrete structures fully, as well as, partially infilled with masonry infill (MI) walls. For that, a numerical study of three groups of two-dimensional framed structure has been conducted under dynamic time–history analysis. The three building groups are classified as nine, six and three stories representing high-rise building, medium-rise building, and low-rise building, respectively. Different infill walls’ configurations have been studied for each group to simulate the bare frame, the infilled frame, the open ground story frame, and the partially opened ground story frame. Double-strut nonlinear cyclic model for MI walls has been utilized to represent nonlinear behavior of infill walls in the framed structures using the structural software package SeismoStruct software. Dynamic time–history analysis, using three different ground motion records to represent wide range of frequency content, has been utilized to study the performance of the studied cases under seismic loading conditions. Based on the obtained results, the seismic performance of the framed structures is strongly influenced after using the infill walls. However, removing the MI walls from the ground story leads to soft story phenomena and makes the structures vulnerable to collapse especially in moderate-to-severe earthquakes. © 2019, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.