Alex Brodsky and Evan Bentz
Alex Brodsky, Postdoctoral fellow, Department of Civil and Mineral Engineering, University of Toronto, 35 St. George Street, Toronto, ON M5S1A4, Canada. Email: alex.brodsky@utoronto.ca
Evan Bentz, Professor, Department of Civil and Mineral Engineering, University of Toronto, 35 St. George Street, Toronto, ON M5S1A4, Canada. Email: bentz@civ.utoronto.ca
ABSTRACT
Reinforced Concrete (RC) infilled frame structures are widely used for public and residential buildings. When a RC frame with inadequate reinforcement details is subjected to extreme loads, shear failure of the frame may occur. This brittle failure mode is unwanted, and different efforts are invested in preventing this failure mode, e.g., strengthening the RC frame. To examine the behaviour of RC infilled frames under such extreme loads and evaluating its shear capacity, the model required to be able to represent the non-linear response of RC. This includes the post cracking tension stiffening, compression softening due to transverse cracking, shear slip along crack surfaces, reinforcement yielding and strain hardening, etc. The present paper presents a detailed two-dimensional model of the RC frame and employed the constitutive relations of the Modified Compression Field Theory (MCFT), which is found to be a good predictor of RC members and in particular the shear behaviour. The infill wall is replaced by multiple struts, which allow representing the infill-frame interaction. The effect of reinforcement details (longitudinal and transverse), the cross-sectional area of the RC frame, and the infill-wall contact length on the infilled frame response and the failure mode are examined.
KEYWORDS: infill walls, infilled frames, MCFT, reinforced concrete, shear failure
