Investigating the effects of structural pounding on the seismic performance of adjacent RC and steel MRFs

Abstract

An insufficient separation distance between adjacent buildings is the main reason for structural pounding during severe earthquakes. The lateral load resistance system, fundamental natural period, mass, and stiffness are important factors having the influence on collisions between two adjacent structures. In this study, 3-, 5- and 9-story adjacent reinforced concrete and steel moment resisting frames (MRFs) were considered to investigate the collision effects and to determine modification factors for new and already existing buildings. For this purpose, incremental dynamic analysis was used to assess the seismic limit state capacity of the structures using a developed algorithm in OpenSees software including two near-field record subsets suggested by FEMA-P695. The results of this paper can help engineers to approximately estimate the performance levels of MRFs due to pounding phenomenon. The results confirm that collisions can lead to the changes in performance levels, which are difficult to be considered during the design process. In addition, the results of the analyses illustrate that providing a fluid viscous damper between adjacent reinforced concrete and steel structures can be effective to eliminate the sudden changes in the lateral force during collision. This approach can be successfully used for retrofitting adjacent structures with insufficient in-between separation distances.

Seismic Pounding Between Adjacent Buildings: A Review

“…Based on the developed models in the previous section, several studies involved realistic building configurations were conducted to address the significance of the pounding effect on the global structural response during seismic actions (e.g., see [6,8] among others). The manifold parameters involved result in multidirectional studies.…”

“…Some of these studies were detected to quantify the safe separation distance between adjacent buildings, (e.g., see [44][45][46][47][48] among others). Other studies were conducted to investigate the effect of the dynamic characteristics of the involved structures either using a deterministic approach (e.g., [8,49] among many others) or using a probabilistic approach [6,50]. However, due to the high computational costs for the probabilistic approach particularly when the impact element is involved, the latter approach was found in a limited number of studies compared to the former approach.…”

“…Moreover, others tackled the site and soil condition of the adjacent building [13,51]. Eventually, the mitigation measures were presented in many studies as in [6,52,53].…”

“…Earthquakes, however, keep deepening the knowledge of the scientific community and keep raising the awareness of the scientific, technical and political community to the need of identifying assets at risk (i.e., such adjacent buildings) and developing more effective risk mitigation strategies. Based on the provided lessons from major earthquakes, a vast body of literature addressing the pounding effects on the structural response of adjacent structures during earthquakes have been found over the past five decades (e.g., see [5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19] among others). The research on earthquake-induced pounding was found in different scales; from studying the impact phenomena to the global performance of the adjacent structures.…”

Highly Dissipative Materials for Damage Protection against Earthquake-Induced Structural Pounding

“…Earthquakes are considered to be the most unpredictable and dangerous dynamic loads that can act on civil engineering structures [1][2][3]. Moreover, it is a very common situation that collisions between adjacent structures occur during seismic excitations due to their differences in structural dynamic parameters and the small gaps between them [4,5]. In most cases, the differences in mass or stiffness of neighboring buildings result in outof-phase vibrations leading to collisions between them [6].…”