Influence of Seismic Pounding on RC Buildings with and without Base Isolation System Subject to Near-Fault Ground Motions

Abstract

Building pounding occurs between two adjacent buildings with small gap or without sufficient separation distance. It leads to damage buildings during earthquake due to impact. Many researchers have investigated building pounding based on impact force reduction and energy dissipation increase, when two buildings collide with each other. In numerical investigations, using specific link element, impact force is calculated in order to get the proper evaluation of damage for preventing failure of structural elements. In this paper, focusing on numerical investigation, the effectiveness of impact and energy dissipation is studied. For this challenge, two RC structural models are considered to evaluate the pounding to calculate the impact force and finally, to compare the effectiveness of Base Isolation (BI) support against fixed support. A link element is located at the connection level between two studied dynamic models.