Estimating the seismic pounding force between adjacent buildings and study the effect of gap distance on seismic pounding

Abstract

Insufficient separation distance between adjacent buildings may lead to their pounding during strong earthquakes causing damage or local failure. Accordingly, most of the design codes specify a minimum separation or gap distance between adjacent buildings to prevent their seismic pounding. Main objectives of this research are studying the seismic pounding between adjacent reinforced concrete (RC) buildings under various ground motions and studying the effect of gap distance on seismic pounding. The studied buildings are modeled as three-dimensional frames to idealize the adjacent buildings. This study considers adjacent frame buildings having the same number of floors as well as frames having a different number of floors. Nonlinear finite element time history analysis is performed using ETABS commercial software. Three different real earthquake records with different characteristics are scaled and used to simulate ground motion. Nonlinear gap element is used to model pounding between buildings at their interface points. The results of the study indicate that, the maximum pounding force was investigated for each of the studied cases. Pounding does not occur between buildings having equal height. Increasing separation distance between buildings reduces the pounding force between them. Separation distance, which is estimated by the Egyptian code, is conservative.