Damage Detection of Masonry Infilled RC Frame Structure

Abstract

Masonry infills in a building frame are normally considered as architectural elements, and their presence is often ignored by design engineers. Existence of the infill walls basically provides higher stiffness and strength for the frames, but their detrimental effect on the structural performance is ignored due to a lack of adequate information about the frame. It has been observed through studies on 2D brick infilled frames that these non-structural elements had a significant effect on the seismic lateral capacity of the buildings but at the cost of ductility. However, very little work has been reported on 3D brick infilled RC framed structures. Secondly study on 3D frame will gave actual and accurate results of the behaviour of structure. It is therefore, very important to study the performance of brick infilled 3D RC framed structure under lateral load. Most of the structures continually accumulate damage during their service life. The damages observed in buildings and other structure during an earthquake initiates the need of exploring the possible new techniques for retrofitting and strengthening the structures. Generally retrofitting of these types of buildings include addition of new members such as shear wall and bracing or strengthening of existing members by Fibre Reinforced Polymer (FRP) like Glass Fibre Reinforced Polymer (GFRP), Carbon Fibre Reinforced Polymer (CFRP), steel or RC jacketing etc. Strengthening of infill can also be done using Engineered Cementitious Composites (also known as ECC Concrete) has been contributing to safer, more durable, and sustainable concrete infra-structure which is cost-effective. In this research effort the load deflection behavior and the change in dynamic characteristics of brick infilled RC frame with increasing lateral loads is studied. A brick infilled RC frame model (1/3 scaled) has been constructed in the laboratory and subjected to increasing lateral loads. The load deflection behavior has been studied till failure.