Abstract:

In the present study, the effects of infill wall rehabilitation on the behavior of reinforced concrete shear wall-frame systems were investigated with the help of the non-linear time-history analysis method. In this context, a 12-story building, built in the Central District of the City of Kırıkkale, and relatively regular in plan, was modeled in the SAP2000 matrix structural analysis software and analyzed as without infill walls (plain), with bare infill walls and with strengthened infill walls. The infill walls were modeled as equivalent compression struts in the frame and the theoretical formulae in the literature are used to determine the thicknesses of these struts. In the selection of earthquake records to be used in the analysis, the faulting characteristics of Kırıkkale, the distance to the fault and the soil properties at the location of the relevant structure were taken into consideration. The analyses depicted that the infill wall strengthening provided significant reductions in the base shear force values of the related structure. Furthermore, infill wall strengthening was observed to provide an effective method for overcoming the story drift and story twist problems.

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