1st Croatian Conference on Earthquake Engineering 1CroCEE 2021

Reinforced Concrete (RC) frame structures are designed and constructed in the major parts of Afghanistan. Meanwhile, the brick masonry wall is one of the most common material that is used as internal and external walls inside the reinforced concrete frame for the building construction. The brick masonry infill wall is defined as a non-structural element for the common structural design software, where only weight is considered, not its strength or stiffness. The Hindu-Kush earthquake, October 2015 that happened in Afghanistan showed that, the buildings with brick masonry walls had less damage or small cracks on the walls. While the buildings without brick masonry walls (bare frames) had serious damage or shear failure on columns. Therefore, the current research aims to find out the effects of brick masonry walls to the seismic performance of RC frame structures by conducting earthquake response analyses of the frame models with and without brick masonry walls. The structural model is based on an actual school building (the 24-classroom school building project that has been designed as a special moment resisting frame with three-stories and constructed in Kabul, Afghanistan). Input earthquake ground motions are generated artificially based on the Afghanistan design spectrum and the phase spectrum of actual earthquake records, such as 1940 El Centro earthquake, 1995 Kobe earthquake and 2003 Bam-earthquake. The nonlinear frame analysis program, STERA 3D, developed by one of the authors is used for the analysis, where the backbone curve of the masonry element is defined including the deterioration of the bearing capacity after yielding. The performance of the frame model is examined to verify the effects of masonry elements from the natural period, the story drift and the damage of the frame and brick masonry walls.