Seismic pounding of adjacent buildings considering torsional effects

This study aims to evaluate pounding effects in fixed-base models by considering torsional irregularity. For this purpose, 8 different adjacent building combinations were created by using 3-dimensional 5- and 9-story building models. In adjacent building models, the most critical situation was determined by evaluating the gap distance, different sequences of the same building models and regular or irregular plan view and if the structures are irregular, their eccentricity cases relative to each other. Nonlinear behavior of structural elements was taken into account for examine the change in the seismic behavior of structural elements due to pounding and torsion effects. The nonlinear time history analysis of the adjacent models was performed for 11 pairs of spectrum compatible ground motion recordings in the SAP2000 program. The results of 176 different analyzes show that the displacement demand, interstory drift ratio, damage ratio and torsional irregularity coefficient values tend to increase in general with the combined effects of pounding and torsion. The absolute maximum and most critical values of the relevant parameters were calculated in irregular structures with pounding where the eccentricity of buildings is in the same direction and same side. In addition, the large standard deviation of the result values according to the ground motion records indicates that care should be taken in choosing the number of ground motion records.