RESEARCH ARTICLE
Influence of Infill Panels and their Distribution on Seismic Behavior of Existing Reinforced Concrete Buildings
Gaetano Manfredi1, Paolo Ricci1, *, Gerardo M. Verderame1
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2012Volume: 6
First Page: 236
Last Page: 253
Publisher ID: TOBCTJ-6-236
DOI: 10.2174/1874836801206010236
Article History:
Received Date: 31/05/2008Revision Received Date: 09/05/2008
Acceptance Date: 20/06/2008
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
Infills can highly influence the seismic response of a Reinforced Concrete (RC) building: generally speaking, their presence leads to an increase in global stiffness and strength, but their brittle behavior can result in an increase of displacement demand if a certain threshold of seismic intensity is overcome. Moreover, presence of infills often leads to a change in the collapse mechanism compared with the bare structure, leading, for instance, to column-sway storey mechanisms characterized by a detrimental localization of inelastic displacement demand. In this paper, a numerical investigation of the influence of infills on the seismic behavior of a case-study existing gravity load designed RC building is carried out. Different infill configurations are considered (Bare, Uniformly infilled and Soft-storey infilled). Seismic capacity assessment is carried out by means of Static Push-Over analyses, within the N2 spectral assessment framework. A sensitivity analysis is carried out, thus evaluating the influence of main material and model parameters on seismic response at different Limit States, namely Damage Limitation and Near Collapse, mainly due to the change in parameters as effective period of vibration, base shear and displacement capacity.