Seismic performance of a full‐scale five‐story masonry‐infilled RC building subjected to substructured pseudodynamic tests

Abstract

AbstractThis paper discusses the results of a series of hybrid earthquake tests on a full‐scale reinforced concrete (RC) building with masonry infills. The prototype was a five‐story structure representing the vulnerable part of a typical RC building in Southern Europe, with beams stronger than the columns and masonry infill walls weaker than the surrounding frame elements. The specimen was subjected to a sequence of unidirectional earthquake simulations of increasing intensity up to conditions of significant damage to the infills, using the pseudodynamic (PsD) testing method with substructuring. The input ground motion was a real earthquake recording, slightly modified in amplitude and frequency to match the elastic design code spectrum. The physical substructure of the hybrid model consisted of the first story of a two‐story mock‐up structure built in the European Laboratory for Structural Assessment (ELSA); the second story ensured realistic boundary conditions at the top of the first one. The characteristics of stories two to five were simulated by a numerical finite‐element model developed in OpenSEES and updated throughout the test sequence using data obtained from preceding tests. The experiments were terminated with the onset of a soft‐story mechanism at the first story of the physical substructure for an earthquake with a peak ground acceleration of 0.3 g. The paper summarizes the key characteristics of the specimen and the major observations from the hybrid tests, illustrating the evolution of structural/nonstructural damage and the cyclic hysteretic building response. The attainment of significant damage limit states is correlated with experimentally defined engineering demand parameters and ground‐motion intensity measures for the performance‐based seismic assessment of buildings. Data and observations from these experiments add substantially to our understanding of the effects of masonry infills on the seismic behavior of RC‐framed structures.