RESEARCH ARTICLE
Masonry Infill RC Frames with Openings: Review of In-plane Lateral Load Behaviour and Modeling Approaches
Sachin Surendran, Hemant B. Kaushik1, *
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2012Volume: 6
First Page: 126
Last Page: 154
Publisher ID: TOBCTJ-6-126
DOI: 10.2174/1874836801206010126
Article History:
Received Date: 17/12/2011Revision Received Date: 4/06/2012
Acceptance Date: 5/06/2012
Electronic publication date: 31/10/2012
Collection year: 2012
open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode. This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
Un-reinforced masonry walls are commonly used as infills in reinforced concrete (RC) buildings. These buildings have high in-plane stiffness and strength, and therefore, the lateral load behaviour of such RC frames is different than that of the frames without infill walls. Openings in walls significantly reduce the lateral strength and stiffness of RC frames, and alter their failure modes. Past researchers have tried to find out experimentally and analytically the influence of several parameters, like opening size and location, aspect ratio of openings, connection between frame and infill wall, ductile detailing in frame members, material properties, failure modes, etc. on behavior of masonry infill RC frames. Accordingly, several analytical models have been proposed in the literature and seismic codes of some countries to model the stiffness and strength properties of infill walls. Most of the past studies and seismic codes recommend modeling the infills as equivalent diagonal struts, and cross-sectional area of the struts are reduced appropriately to account for openings in the walls. Analytical methods have also been proposed to estimate the possible mode of failure and lateral load carrying capacity of infill frames with and without openings. The current article is intended to review and compare past relevant studies and seismic codes of different countries on in-plane lateral load behaviour and modeling approaches for masonry infill RC frames with openings. The comparative study may help designers and code developers in selecting and recommending suitable analytical models for estimating strength, stiffness, failure modes, and other properties of infill RC frames with openings.
