A practical, economic and effective as well as occupant friendly seismic strengthening technique had been developed for reinforced concrete (RC) framed buildings lacking sufficient lateral stiffness. In this technique, high strength concrete plates are bonded onto the existing plastered hollow brick infill walls using a thin layer of epoxy mortar in order that infill walls are converted into lateral load resisting shear walls resulting from the composite action of infill wall with the plates

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... ded onto it. By this way, the building gains sufficient lateral stiffness. To analyze the behavior of RC frames strengthened by the aforementioned technique, results of eight one-third scale, one-bay, one or two storey deficient RC frames tested under reverse-cyclic lateral loading until failure are given in detail. Three different types of plates were used to strengthen the frames. Test results showed that the proposed strengthening technique considerably increased the lateral load capacities as well as the initial stiffness and energy dissipation capacities of the strengthened specimens, for both types of frames. Additionally, present study focuses on the comparison results of one-storey specimens with those of equivalent two-storey specimens to well-understand the behavior of such strengthened frames under lateral load, and infill walls under compressive and shear forces as well as tensile forces. Both the first storey and second storey bays were infilled with scaled (one-third scale) hollow brick infill