Linking of adjacent three-storey buildings for mitigation of structural pounding during earthquakes

Abstract

The reports after major earthquakes indicate that the earthquake-induced pounding between insufficiently separated buildings may lead to significant damage or even total collapse of structures. An intensive study has recently been carried out on mitigation of pounding hazards so as to minimize the structural damages or prevent collisions at all. The aim of this paper is to investigate the effectiveness of the method when two adjacent three-storey buildings with different (substantially different) dynamic properties are connected at each storey level by link elements (springs, dashpots or viscoelastic elements). The results of the study indicate that connecting the structures by additional link elements can be very beneficial for the lighter and more flexible building. The largest decrease in the response of the structure has been obtained for links with large stiffness or damping values, which stands for the case when two buildings are fully connected and vibrate in-phase. Moreover, by comparing the effectiveness of different types of link elements, it has been confirmed that the use of viscoelastic elements reduces the peak displacement of the structure at lower stiffness and damping values comparing to the case when spring and dashpot elements are applied alone. On the other hand, the results of the study demonstrate that applying the additional link elements does not really change the response of the heavier and stiffer building. The final conclusion of the study indicates that linking two buildings allows us to reduce the in-between gap size substantially while structural pounding can be still prevented.

Integrated Design of Hybrid Interstory-Interbuilding Multi-Actuation Schemes for Vibration Control of Adjacent Buildings under Seismic Excitations

“…Recent works on the seismic response of adjacent structures include nonlinear dynamical models for pounding events [2][3][4][5], stochastic assessment of pounding risk [6], structural analysis of large buildings connected by sky-bridge links [7], seismic response of adjacent nonstructural components [8], and reduced-order models for the study of the analytical characteristics of linked structures [9][10][11][12]. Also, a wide variety of control strategies has been recently proposed, including passive linking systems with viscous and viscoelastic elements [13][14][15][16][17][18], nonlinear linking dampers [19,20], semiactive magnetorheological linking dampers [21][22][23], shared Tuned-Mass-Dampers [24][25][26], and active linking devices [27,28]. Improved performance and robustness can be attained by hybrid control schemes that make a combined use of interbuilding linking elements and vibration control systems implemented in the individual buildings.…”

Modal Analysis of a Steel Radial Gate Exposed to Different Water Levels

“…More destructive dynamic loads, including earthquakes (Jankowski and Mahmoud 2015, Naderpour et al 2016, may also occur in our country (see Fig. 1), although their frequency of occurrence is relatively low.…”

A Structural Pounding Formulation Using Systematic Modal Truncation

“…[1,3,8,[22][23][24]). Mostly pounding elements with a linear or a nonlinear spring damper system, following the Hertz law, are applied (cf.…”

“…It has been observed that the motion of buildings due to earthquake excitation may not cause as much damage to buildings as the result of possible pounding between them [1][2][3][4]. Pounding occurs if the separation distance between adjacent buildings is not sufficient in order to compensate for their relative movements.…”

“…In the work of Géradin and Rixen [19], a nodeless dual-superelement is formulated to reduce the degrees of freedom of the unilateral contact problems. Most of the researches focus on the modeling and mitigation of the constitutive pounding law [1,3,8]; few of them attempt to apply model reduction techniques for the pounding problems.…”