Modeling of the seismic performance of buildings with infilled RC frames

This paper proposes a novel approach for the efficient simulation of the nonlinear performance of buildings with infilled RC frames under seismic loads. The proposed modeling framework can be particularly helpful for actual buildings with multiple stories and bays, for which the current methods can be cumbersome to implement, or inaccurate. This framework uses a novel approach to estimate the backbone curve for every bay and then combines these to obtain the force-vs.-drift ratio for every floor. This curve is used to calibrate a set of two diagonal struts along each line of resistance. The results from the shake-table tests of a two-bay, three-story frame tested at University at California, San Diego are used to validate the newly developed framework. The comparison indicates that the proposed approach can capture the important features of the nonlinear structural behavior with minimal computational effort.