Seismic Impact Analysis of Infill and Without Infill Walls in Multi-Story Buildings

Abstract

The present study attempts to estimate typical variations in magnification factor of a mid rise open ground storey building accounting for the variability of compressive strength and modulus of elasticity of infill walls with various infill arrangements so that it can help designers facing trouble with heavy designs for a structure of mid-size, with the given material properties, geometry and loadings in particular. For the present study Equivalent static analysis (ESA) and Response spectrum analysis (RSA) is considered for the comparative study. The building will be analyzed for two different cases: i) Considering infill mass but without considering infill stiffness. ii) Considering both infill mass and infill stiffness. From the present results it is found that building with soft storey will exhibit poor performance during a strong shaking. But the open ground storey is an important functional requirement of almost all the urban multi-storey buildings and hence cannot be eliminated. Alternative measures need to be adopted for this specific situation. The under-lying principle of any solution to this problem is in i) increasing the stiffness of the ground storey; ii) provide adequate lateral strength in the ground storey. The possible schemes to avoid the vulnerability of open ground storey buildings under earthquake forces can be by providing stiff columns in open ground storey buildings or by providing adjacent infill walls at each corner of soft ground storey buildings.