Research of the effect of infill walls on soft storey occurrence

Although our country has intense risk of earthquake, the omission of infill wall effects during the process of structural design is being discussed. This situation has been the subject of many academic studies until now. These studies show the effects of infill wall on the behavior of structure. Especially in the analyses of structures, the effects of infill walls that are considered just a dead load on the behaviour of frame are omitted but this case can cause unpredictable damages on structure during an earthquake. As an msc thesis, in this study, the buildings that include various design types and the effects of infill walls on the behaviours of these buildings were researched. The walls of the buildings were modelled according to the calculation principles of equivalent compression struts method. With including the existing walls in structural model or excluding from it, various designs were obtained and analysed as linear. And also the results were researched. In addition to the linear analyses, a building that includes infill walls was made pushover analysis and plastic hinges which were determined on structural elements were observed. Also, first floor of the building was raised and same analyses were applied again. So, because of this condition, the occurrence of soft storey irregularity was researched. In additon to soft storey irregularity, the infill walls acting on weak storey irregularity and torsional irregularity occurrences were observed. In this thesis, as a result, lineer and nonlineer analyses were done with seismic loads calculated with equivalent seismic load method and applied on the buildings. With the results of these analyses, the effects of infill walls and shear walls on behaviours of structures, horizontal displacements of structures and also variances of period magnitudes were studied. In calculations of structures, the results has indicated that the approach of omitting infill walls is not reliable and infill walls have an influence on occurrence of soft storey irregularity.