SEISMIC ANALYSIS OF POUNDING IN BUILDINGS

Abstract

Major seismic events during the past decade have continued to demonstrate the destructive power of earthquakes, with destruction of engineered buildings, bridges, industrial and port facilities as well as giving rise to great economic losses. In urban/metropolitan cities buildings are constructed very close to each other because of high land value. Because of the insufficient gap, which is provided between adjacent buildings or adjacent units of same building are most vulnerable to seismic damage due to Pounding. Adjacent buildings may have different functional requirements such as one is for residential and another is for public/commercials buildings based on the owner interests, so they may have different configurations and dynamic properties (Time period and frequency etc.). During an earthquake these adjacent buildings may vibrate out of phase leads to slight architectural damage to severe structural damages. In this paper Nonlinear Time History analysis is done for different cases of building positions and their floor levels are mentioned below.Two adjacent buildings are constructed with (1) ‘Buildings with Same Height and Same Floor’, (2) ‘Buildings with Same Height but Different Floor’.(3) ‘Buildings with Different Height and Same Floor Levels’, (4) ‘Buildings with Different Heights and Different Floor Levels (Floor-Mid Column)’. The adjacent buildings are modeled in Sap 2000 v 17 and analysis is carried out to find the Seismic response (Impact force) of buildings with connecting two floor levels of adjacent buildings by ‘Gap Element model’ when subjected to Different ground motions. In this paper also considered four adjacent buildings are constructed in a row with ‘Different Height but Same Floor Levels’ and ‘Different Height and Different Floor Level (Floor-Mid Column)’. When the two buildings are placed at different heights the impact force is more than buildings with the same heights. Also when buildings are in a row exterior building suffers more pounding damage than the interior building.