Fundamental period of RC buildings with infill walls in Nepal

Bibek Panthi, Peshal Dahal, Prabesh Shrestha, Kamal Bahadur Thapa

Abstract: The presence of infill walls in a building increases the stiffness and mass of the building leading to significant changes in the fundamental period. If this increase in stiffness is not considered, it may cause severe damages to the buildings during the earthquakes. This paper presents an analysis of the fundamental period of buildings considering the effect of infill walls. For this, a computer program was created to generate buildings with different configurations and calculate the fundamental period. It was found that besides the geometric parameters: number of stories and the height of the building, the bay span also had a significant effect on the fundamental period. Thus, a formula that takes into account those parameters was formulated for infilled reinforced concrete (RC) frames. The building codes must take parameters like bay span and the presence of infill walls into account for estimating the fundamental period.