Review of Seismic Performances of Partial Infill RC Frames

Partial infill frames are constructed by filling the bare frame with brick masonry to a certain height throughout the length of the frame. The walls generally restrain a part of the column to deform freely and a leftover portion remains captive which attracts large shear force and shows brittle failure (called captive column failure) during an earthquake, often leading to collapse of the building. Although sufficient experimental investigation has been carried out for infill walls with openings, the same for partial infill frame and recommendations for its modelling in building frame analysis are very limited. This paper collates the performances of partial infill RC frames during major past earthquakes and attempts to provide a review of the major literature on the performance of partial infill frames studied through experiments and numerical models, and their simplified analytical formulations. Further, some available methods to prevent captive column effect are also presented in this paper. The performance of retrofitted partial infill frames, which previously failed due to the captive column effect, studied experimentally by other researchers are also summarised.