The effects of infill walls and basement shear walls on the seismic performance of existing damaged building

Abstract Many buildings have basement and some of these basements partially surrounded by shear walls. This partial surrounding causes torsional irregularity, which may increase the damage under the effect of a severe earthquake. A reliable seismic performance estimation is an important issue and there are different methods in the estimation of this performance such as nonlinear static procedure and time history analysis. Nonlinear static procedure does not give accurate results for irregular buildings, thus nonlinear time history analysis is a more convenient method in the estimation of seismic performance of a building, which has such irregularities. Additionally, recent researches showed that infill walls have significant effects on the seismic behavior of a building. In this study, a 6-story RC building with partial surrounded basement, which suffered damage in Kocaeli 1999 earthquake, was considered. The seismic performance of the building was estimated according to Turkish Seismic Code for Buildings (TSC) 2007 using nonlinear time history analysis. Buildings, which are partially and fully surrounded with shear walls in the basement, were modeled with and without infill walls and existing damage was tried to be estimated analytically.