Influence of infill masonry walls in RC building structures under cornercolumn failure scenarios

Abstract

Extreme events may cause local damage to building structures, and this can be most serious when one or more columns fail. Several studies were carried out for the failure of interior or end columns. The major advances in this direction come from numerical studies and testing of scaled substructures. However, some of the alternative load paths can not be evaluated by testing substructures. In this study, a complete and real-scale RC building structure was carried out by ICITECH of the Universitat Politècnica de València to assess its progressive collapse behaviour under corner-column failure scenarios without and with the consideration of infill masonry walls. Before testing, as a reference for the experimental tests, a finite element model was developed in ABAQUS considering a dynamic analysis and material and geometrical non-linearities. This paper analyses the results predicted by the numerical simulation: alternative load paths, displacements and damage of the RC structure.