Fundamental period of masonry infilled moment‐resisting steel frame buildings

Summary It is known to be a necessary practice to study the effect of infill walls on fundamental period and revise the equations included in the current building codes. In this research, the fundamental period of vibration, by modeling an infill wall as a compression strut in three‐dimensional numerical models of moment‐resisting steel frames, was studied. Areas studied in the present research were structures of symmetric infill wall arrangements wherein the effects of various infill percentage, various moduli of elasticity of masonry wall materials, and different numbers of spans were investigated. The mean fundamental period obtained by the formula provided in FEMA450 was 1.3 times greater than the value resulted from the numerical modeling of infilled moment‐resisting steel frames. Moreover, the corresponding coefficient of determination, R2, of the curve fitted to numerically obtained periods was found to be 0.65 when the fundamental period of the infilled frames was only estimated based on the height of buildings, indicating a great deal of variation within the results. A new formula was proposed to estimate the fundamental period based on the structure height, infill wall percentage, and modulus of elasticity, at an acceptable level of accuracy so that the R2 coefficient was determined to be 0.99 for the results of the proposed formula.