Abstract

The construction of confined masonry buildings has become a good choice to meet the housing needs of low-income families in
big cities. Despite this, current building codes for such construction allow the use of highly simplified analysis techniques that have hardly changed in the last 40 years. This paper is based on numerical simulation and discusses the need to combine and improve existing techniques in finite-element method (FEM) analysis for composite materials, to assess the overall structural behavior of reinforced concrete structures with masonry in-fills, and consequently to support the derivation of rational rules for analysis and design. Through the use of a simple yet powerful shell finite element (FE), state-of-the-art theories of mixtures to analyze composite materials, a computational tool to generate the volume fraction of composites, and the Mexican building code, this paper attempts to be a guide to numerical reproduction of the overall behavior of confined masonry structures.