Seismic fragility of lightly reinforced concrete frames with masonry infills

Summary Seismic fragility of lightly reinforced concrete frames with masonry infills is assessed through numerical simulations considering uncertainty in ground motion and building materials. To achieve this aim, a numerical model of the components is developed, a rational approach to proportion and locate individual struts in the equivalent three‐strut model is proposed, and an explicit nonlinear column shear response model accounting for the infill–column interaction and soft‐story mechanism is employed. The proposed numerical model is used to (1) generate probabilistic seismic demand models accounting for a wide range of ground motion intensities with different frequency content and (2) determine limit state models obtained from nonlinear pushover analysis and incremental dynamic analysis. Using the demand and limit state model, fragility curves for the masonry‐infilled frames are developed to investigate the impact of various infill properties on the frame vulnerability. It is observed that the beneficial effect of the masonry infill diminishes at more severe limit states because of the interaction with the boundary frame. In some cases, this effect almost vanishes or switches to an adverse effect beyond a threshold of ground motion intensities. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.