ABSTRACT
Hinged steel frames were popularly adopted as the structural systems of historical buildings in Shanghai, China, during the period from 1920 to 1939. In an infilled steel frame, the infilled wall stiffens the frame, and the frame, by holding the infilled wall together after it cracks, prolongs the loading bearing capacity of the infilled wall. The shaking tests were implemented on two 1/4 scale, 3-storey hinged steel frame model structures with or without infills to investigate the influence of the infills. The significant problems associated with dynamic testing of scaled models that were notified by researchers concern the modeling scaled material properties, the financial restrictions leading to test limited number of specimens and limitations of specimen size due to capacity of available shaking tables. Under major earthquakes of intensity 8, severe shaking responses happened in M1 and previously observed cracks developed wider, which resulted in a significant reduction of natural frequencies of M1.
