An investigation of earthquake induced pounding between adjacent buildings

Abstract

SUMMARYThe response of adjacent buildings in city blocks to several strong earthquakes is analysed, taking into account the mutual collisions, or pounding, resulting from insufficient or non-existing separation distances. The buildings are idealized as lumped-mass, shear beam type, multi-degree-of-freedom (MDOF) systems with bilinear force-deformation characteristics and with bases supported on translational and rocking spring-dashpots. Collisions between adjacent masses can occur at any level and are simulated by means of viscoelastic impact elements. Using five real earthquake motions the effects of the following factors are investigated building configuration and relative size, seismic separation distance and impact element properties. It is found that pounding can cause high overstresses, mainly when the colliding buildings have significantly different heights, periods or masses. This suggests a possibility for introducing a set of conditions into the codes, combined with some special measures, as an alternative to the seismic separation requirement.

State-of-the-Art of Research on Seismic Pounding Between Buildings with Aligned Slabs

“…Thus, only loose criteria for selecting it have been provided: studies [Anagnostopoulos 1988;Khatiwada, Chouw 2014] suggest using significantly higher values than the lateral stiffness of the colliding buildings, [Anagnostopoulos, Spiliopoulos 1992] recommends that the local periods of the mass-impact springs keep below the lowest translational periods of the pounding buildings, [Maison, Kasai 1992] proposes considering the axial stiffness of the floor slabs, [Watanabe, Kawashima 2004] refers also to the axial d…”

Effect of Planar Impact Modeling on the Pounding Response of Base-Isolated Buildings

“…Furthermore, this model exhibits an initial jump in the impact force values due to the viscous damping term, while the damping force at the end of the restitution phase causes negative (i.e., tensile/adhesive) contact forces that pull the colliding bodies together, which is unrealistic for most structural materials. However, due to its simplicity, this model has been widely used to simulate structural pounding (Anagnostopoulos and Spiliopoulos, 1992;Jankowski et al, 1998;Zhu et al, 2002).…”

Prediction of Critical Distance Between Two MDOF Systems Subjected to Seismic Excitation in Terms of Artificial Neural Networks

“…Anagnostopolos [2,3] also investigated effect of gap size and presented that pounding might cause severe structural damage in some cases and even collapse is possible in some extreme situations. Some parametric study results in terms of relative lateral displacement of adjacent buildings have been presented by Hao and Shen [4].…”