13-09-2017, 04:28 PM
Reinforced concrete frames filled with masonry constitute a significant portion of the inventory of buildings in seismically active regions around the world. Although initial efforts to analyze the behavior of filled frames (eg, Polyakov 1960) go back more than half a century, modeling the interaction between frame members and masonry filler walls remains an area of active research. It is well known that the strength of a filled frame is not a simple sum of the strength of a bare frame and that of the filler wall due to the fact that the load resistance mechanism of a frame can change as a result of its interaction with the filling.