Earthquake Performance of Reinforced Concrete Frames with Different Infill Walls

Infill walls are used frequently as interior or exterior partitions in reinforced concrete frames in the world. The behavior of infill wall frames have been studied experimentally and analytically by a number of researchers and it has been recognized that infill walls have important effects on dynamic characteristics of structural system. However, these effects of infill walls neglected in analysis of buildings. For this reason, the horizontal rigidity effect of infill walls has not been proven to be a valid model. Therefore, infill walls generally defined as dead load in the analysis to stay on the safe side but ignoring the infill panel interaction is not always on the safe side under lateral loads. It may adversely affect the structural system during an earthquake. The main purpose of this study is the effects of infill walls on the structural behavior which are not accounted in the structural design of reinforced concrete buildings. For this purpose, nonlinear analyzes were performed using dissimilar modeling methods proposed by different researchers. These methods were analyzed using different analyze softwares. Three separate building systems were used for each different method. Hence, diverse building models have been created and the behaviors of these structures under lateral loads have been investigated in order to identify the effects of infill walls. Each building model created was analyzed in three different situations including bare frame, the frame with brick infill wall and the frame with Autoclaved Aerated Concrete (AAC) infill wall. Hereby, the outcomes obtained from analysis on bare frame and the frame with infill walls has been compared. At the end of the analysis, it is observed that infill walls have significant effect on structural period, lateral displacement, base shear force and structural behavior. Keywords: Infill wall, structural period, lateral displacement, base shear force, earthquake