APPLICATION OF THE LOCAL TO GLOBAL APPROACH TO THE STUDY OF INFILLED FRAME STRUCTURES UNDER SEISMIC LOADING

This paper aims at presenting the numerical studies associated to a testing program carried out at the National Laboratory for Civil Enginnering of Portugal (LNEC, Lisbon). The extensive experimental study concerns a serie of one-bay reinforced concrete frames without and with masonry panels tested under cyclic loading. Associated to these tests, some calculations with the same cyclic loading have been performed using refined material models (fibre-type model for RC frame, joint model for the interface between frame and infill and plasticity based model for masonry) and global models which allows cyclic and dynamic computation on large structures. The numerical and experimental results show quite good agreement: the use of these material models give some useful information on both the failure pattern and the global characteristics of this type of structure (maximum strength, stiffness, hysteretic behaviour…).