A Proposal on the Simplified Structural Evaluation Method for Existing Reinforced Concrete Buildings with Infilled Brick Masonry Walls

The developing countries in the earthquake prone regions in the world are still suffering a lot of casualties as well as building damage. These damages might be caused by inadequate structural design by engineers and/or poor quality control of construction works. In order to contribute to disaster mitigation for existing reinforced concrete (RC) buildings in developing countries, the simplified structural evaluation method based on the philosophy of Japanese evaluation standard; JBDPA (The Japan building disaster prevention association. Standard for seismic evaluation of existing reinforced concrete buildings, 2001) vis-a-vis the international seismic code; IBC (International Code Council, Inc. International Building Code, 2000) was developed by Seki (J Earthq Sci Eng, 2015). However, this evaluation method doesn’t consider the infilled brick masonry wall inside the beam and column. The usual RC building has many infilled brick masonry walls but these are not considered in the structural seismic design. They have the benefit in the strength capacity and the disadvantage in the brittle failure mode. For the structural evaluation of existing RC buildings, the consideration of the infilled brick masonry wall is quite important to get the actual behavior during the strong earthquake. The main objective of this study is to take the infilled brick masonry wall into the structural evaluation for the existing RC building in developing countries.