Analytical Study of the Effect of Different Parameters on the Seismic Performance of Masonry Infilled RC Frames

The construction of reinforced concrete buildings with masonry infill walls has been a very common practice in Iran. Nowadays, the impact of the RC frame and masonry infill on the structure is one of the major challenges in engineering researches, and often engineers ignore infill in designing the building. Due to the damages observed in past earthquakes, masonry infill can have both positive and negative impacts on the seismic performance of RC structure. In this paper, the effect of masonry infill on the in-plane behavior of the concrete frames and the impact of seismic and non-seismic details with the effect of level of axial load and thickness of infill in lateral resistance of concrete frames is investigated, by the nonlinear finite element method. First, the proposed models have been validated using the experimental results in ABAQUS finite element software. Results show that the increasing axial load causes to increase in ultimate strength and effective stiffness and reduces the ductility of the seismic frame. The ultimate strength, effective stiffness, and ductility of frame and infill-frame with seismic detailing were increased compared to the frame and infill-frame with non-seismic properties. Increasing the thickness of masonry enhance the infill behavior in terms of strength, effective stiffness and ductility in both seismic and non-seismic frame.