Effects of seismic pounding between adjacent structures considering structure-soil-structure interaction

Structures located beside each other interact under dynamic loads both through the underlying soil and possibly by impact. In this paper, this dynamic cross-interaction phenomenon is studied parametrically. While simultaneous modeling of different adjacent buildings would be possible from the beginning, by resorting to simple physical models the cases susceptible to impact under harmonic loads are identified first with much less effort. Then comprehensive models containing two nonlinear multistory shear buildings connected at the base with suitable springs & dampers and impacting at story levels are developed. The system is analyzed under selected ground motions. It is shown that impact and cross-interaction have an increasing effect on lateral displacements for stiff and heavy structures and a decreasing effect for other cases. Also, the shear forces of stories increase and decrease in upper and lower stories, respectively, as a result of the mentioned mutual effect. Finally, the study shows that under a sample ground motion, simultaneous impact and cross-interaction increase the ductility demands of stories for taller structures while it decreases the ductility demand of shorter buildings.