Essay On Infill Walls

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The construction of the reinforced concrete framed structures with brick masonry infill walls is widely adopted for commercial, industrial and residential buildings. For the functional needs and aesthetic reasons, the brick infill panels are widely used as internal and external partition walls in the reinforced concrete structures; but they are usually treated as non-structural elements. The self-weight of infill walls is considered to be acting on the beams but the contribution of the infill walls to provide resistance to the seismic loading is generally ignored in the structural analysis despite significant advances in computer technology and availability of modern computational resources.
In buildings, the ordinarily occurring gravity dead and live loads do not create much of a problem, but the lateral loads like the earthquake forces need special attention and they are to be taken care of, mainly in the seismic prone areas. Seismic analysis is the structural analysis which involves the study of the response of a structure to the earthquake. The lateral forces can reach a stage of discomfort to the occupants in that structure. To treat the seismic …show more content…

The lateral load arising from an earthquake is transferred into the infill from the surrounding frame. The mass of infill is accounted in the practices but the stiffness contribution is usually ignored. Therefore, infilled frame is usually designed as bare frame treating infill as non-structural component and the lateral load is assumed to be completely resisted by the skeletal frame. This leads to a significantly different response. When the columns receive horizontal forces at floor levels, they try to sway in the horizontal direction, but masonry walls help to resist this movement. Due to the additional stiffness, these walls attract rather larger horizontal

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