Seismic Pounding Between Adjacent Buildings: A Review

Abstract

The collision between adjacent buildings with an insufficient seismic separation distance has been reported after earthquakes. This collision between adjacent buildings, commonly referred to as earthquake-induced pounding, entails huge damages to the involved buildings. The main cause of damage was interpreted to the developed impact forces between colliding buildings. The intensity of the impact force relies on many factors, therefore, a significant research effort was found to address this issue from different perspectives. This paper presents a summary of the main research conducted in the context of structural pounding namely, field observations, experimental and numerical studies. The main recommendations and results of each category have been highlighted and insights for future research are provided.

Assessment of seismic vulnerability of RC frames at the end-of-row of buildings with floor-to-floor alignment using multi-strips analysis MSA

“…For buildings with insufficient gap distance, collisions are inevitable. The collision between adjacent structures, also known as the pounding phenomena, significantly changes the global response of the collided buildings namely the loading path and, therefore, the collapse mechanisms [1][2][3]. Devastating earthquake events leave huge life and economical losses, particularly for those structures with inherited seismic vulnerability.…”

“…Over 50 years, a vast body of literature addressing the pounding effects on the structural response has been found based on the provided lessons from major earthquakes (e.g., see [1,7] among others). These studies were found on different scales; from studying the impact phenomena on the global performance of the adjacent structures with a limited number of ground motions [8][9][10][11].…”

“…The base idea of PBEE aims not only to confidently improve the structural performance of structures subjected to earthquakes but also to provide a deep understanding of effective seismic risk mitigation measures. However, the high computational effort that is required for PBEE studies limited their use for studies that involved pounding phenomena [1,2]. As such, a few studies were found to study the adjacent building in the scope of the PBEE.…”

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

“…Observations after many earthquake indicates that local damage at the interaction point is due to insufficient separation between buildings. Therefore, major efforts have been directed towards the problem of seismic analysis of buildings using different modeling techniques (Mohamed et al 2021).…”