Effect of Gap Length and Using Viscoelastic Damper on ReducingSeismic Pounding in Adjacent Low-Rise Concrete Buildings

Subject Areas : Analysis of Structure and Earthquake

s.mehdi  zahraei ¹ (دانشگاه تهران)
s.mohammad  khatami ² (دانشگاه پورتو)

Received: 2016-06-14 Accepted : 2016-08-23 Published : 2017-01-08

Keywords: viscoelastic damper, RC building, seismic pounding, gap distance between adjacent buildings,

Abstract :

Significant growth of buildings in different shapes and heights in urban areas and lack of attention to their dependence being adjacent to each other during earthquakes has increased devastating effects of seismic loads. Existing buildings have been designed and constructed separately against earthquakes. However, to pounding of adjacent buildings has been less paid attention. Since different buildings are designed independently thus their floor levels are not at the same height and probable sudden poundings during earthquakes can damage and collapse the weaker building. There are two kinds of such poundings: floor to floor and floor to column that 1st case is investigated in this research. In this paper, in order to determineand reduce the pounding forces between adjacent buildings, two 2 and 3-story RC buildings are considered in which floor to floor pounding is studied. To prevent or reduce pounding damage, the effect of gap distance between two adjacent buildings and using viscoelastic damper in their bracingon reducing seismic impact and related pounding are investigated. SAP2000 and ANSYS are used for numerical study.Analyses results show that using viscoelastic dampers and increasing distance between two buildings would reduce their lateral displacements and related pounding. For example, 3cm distance between two adjacent buildings would create 7 impacts while increasing the distance to 4.5cm would reduce the impacts to 2. Also, placement of viscoelastic dampers between building floors would control their lateral displacements and reduce the impacts to just one.