Seismosoft | Earthquake Engineering Solutions

Dear SeismoSoft team,

I am trying to model non-ductile RC frames with masonry infill, where columns are likely to form plastic hinges, in SeismoStruct. Does the multi-strut infill panel has capacity of modeling plastic hinge formation in the columns?

Thank you.

It is not very clear what you mean with your question. The infill element type models the infill panels and it is irrelevant with the ability (or not) of the frame elements to form plastic hinges at their edges. If you employ an inelastic type of element for the columns (e.g. infrmFBPH) you will be able to model the plastic hinges
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Smyrou et al. (2011) state that "It is important to note that the
model does not have the capacity of modeling possible plastic hinges in the columns, even
though it does consider the eccentricity of the struts. If the formation of plastic hinges in the
length of the column is important, a different strut configuration should be implemented."

I was wondering if the formulation prevents the possible plastic hinging mechanism even in the case where beam-column elements are modeled with distributed plasticity or lumped elements.

Reference:
Smyrou, E., Blandon, C., Antoniou, S., Pinho, R., & Crisafulli, F. (2011). Implementation and verification of a masonry panel model for nonlinear dynamic analysis of infilled RC frames. Bulletin of Earthquake Engineering, 9(5), 1519-1534.

The formulation does not prevent the possible plastic hinges. What the paper means is that, despite the fact that model considers the eccentricity of the struts, it is not possible to affect the behaviour of the frame elements to consider this eccentricity in the formation of the plastic hinges.
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could we model confined masonry walls with seismostruct

Currently there is not a masonry element type available in SeismoStruct, but we are planning to introduce one, possibly in SeismoStruct v2019.

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