Experimental and numerical studies of seismic induced story-to-story and inter-story pounding

Abstract

Pounding between adjacent buildings was repeatedly observed during many major earthquakes. Previous studies on building pounding are mainly based on the analytical and numerical investigations. A few experimental studies were reported, but these studies mainly focused on the story-to-story pounding, which is not necessarily the case in engineering practices. When the story heights of two adjacent buildings are different, inter-story pounding occurs. Moreover, most buildings have irregular shapes, which may result in the eccentric poundings. Few experimental studies have been performed to understand the combined inter-story and eccentric poundings between adjacent buildings yet. This paper presents the experimental studies on the seismic pounding between adjacent multi-story buildings. Shaking table tests on three 1/3 scaled 2-story and 3-story buildings were performed to understand their behaviors when they were subjected to the earthquake ground motions. The story-to-story pounding, inter-story pounding, and eccentric pounding are experimentally investigated and the results are presented and analyzed in this paper. Then a detail 3D FE model is developed and validated by experiment data. The effect of mass eccentricity on inter-story pounding is analyzed by the numerical model. The experimental and numerical results show that, pounding can induce much higher frequency contents to the structural responses compared to the case without pounding, and the pounding forces in the story-to-story pounding case are larger than those in the inter-story pounding case; mass eccentricity has obvious influence on the base share force and displacement response of the building.