Effect of variation on infill masonry walls in the seismic performance of soft story RC building

This paper investigates the influence of variation on infill masonry wall extent in the seismic performance of low-rise reinforced concrete (RC) buildings. The recent Gorkha earthquake of 2015 in Nepal (M-W 7.8) depicted that the infill masonry walls play a vital role in damage extent as well as life safety issues of occupants in residential buildings. However, no thorough analysis was found in existing literature to address the problem in RC buildings considering the variation on infill wall percentage. To this end, we assessed the impact of variation on infill wall percentage using finite element modelling. We carried out nonlinear pushover analysis for a bare frame and the masonry infill extent as 25%, 50%, 75%, and 100% for a representative four-storied soft story RC building. Thereafter, we compared the seismic performance in terms of base shear, performance point, inter-story drift, story level deflection, and fundamental natural period of the building as well. The sum of findings concludes that infill walls significantly affect the seismic performance of RC buildings; thus, infill walls deserve considerable attention in design process.