A comprehensive study to evaluate the seismic performance of reinforced concrete (RC) buildings including unreinforced masonry (URM) infill walls is performed in three sequential parts: (1) shake-table experiments, (2) computational modeling, and (3) reliability-based performance evaluation. A hypothetical prototype building with RC frames, RC floor slabs, and URM infill walls is considered. A reduced-scale test structure was constructed to represent a substructure of the prototype building and subjected to a sequence of ground motions. The shake-table experiments and the global and local response of the test structure are discussed in detail. Several post-test computational modeling approaches and a detailed finite element (FE) model representing the URM infill walls are evaluated. The validated FE model is used to understand the in-plane and out-of-plane responses for RC frames with URM infill walls subjected to bidirectional seismic loading. A three-dimensional strut and tie (SAT) model is formulated for practical representation of the combined in-plane and out-of-plane failure surface in conventional computational platforms. Finally, the prototype building is considered to demonstrate a framework for practical reliability analysis of RC buildings containing URM infill walls, and fragility functions are determined for the prototype building subjected to near-fault ground motions.
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