Keywords: infill walls, steel braces, SPEAR building, open ground floor, partial safety factors, overall structure response..

The majority of reinforced concrete (RC) buildings in seismic prone regions has been designed and constructed before modern seismic norms were introduced, thus, fulfilling much lower capacity and seismic demand requirements. A very important parameter that plays a paramount role on the seismic response of RC structures is the existence of infill walls. Especially in the case of older RC buildings, the contribution of infills is in general even more crucial. The case of partially infilled frames and especially when the ground storey is open while the upper ones are infilled (i.e., the so-called pilotis), is a very common construction type that exhibits high seismic vulnerability. On the other hand, one quite popular retrofitting technique that is used for improving seismic capacity of old RC buildings (mainly in a global manner), is the addition of steel braces in selected bays of the bearing structure. In the study, described in this paper, the combined effects of the aforementioned issues are investigated, while emphasis is given on the susceptibility of the results when adopting various values for the mechanical parameters of infill walls which have many inherent uncertainties. For this purpose, a parametric study has been performed, using non-linear static (pushover) analyses, utilizing a prototype RC structure, which is the well-known SPEAR building that has been studied for various purposes in the past.

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