Heavier adjacent building pounding due to earthquake excitation

Pounding between adjacent buildings is a detrimental issue for buildings in cities because they are closely located while vibrating out of phase due to different dynamic properties (mainly different mass and/or height) during earthquake excitation. This paper presents a numerical study on the pounding between the adjacent buildings with different masses during earthquake excitation. The buildings modeled via lumped mass procedure are connected by linear vico-elastic contact force model during pounding. Seismic responses of the buildings due to earthquake acceleration are obtained for different building configurations and the results are discussed and compared. Pounding effect is amplified for the lighter building while pounding effect is negligible for the heavier building.