Evaluation of the effect of infill walls on seismic performance of RC dual frames

Masonry infill walls have many beneficial and disadvantageous effects on seismic performances of RC frames. Despite such remarkable effects, practicing engineers usually neglect the effects of infill walls on seismic behavior of structures. This study aims to demonstrate that neglecting the effects of infill walls during the nonlinear dynamic analysis of the RC frames may lead to the dramatic misunderstanding the seismic performance of the structure. To this end seismic response of 18 models of the same structure and different arrangements of the infill walls to four different ground motions were investigated using PERFORM 3D software. Results of this study revealed that changing the arrangement of infill walls may change the damage state of the building during an earthquake.