A Literature Review on Modeling and Mitigating the Pounding Effects in Buildings

During an earthquake event, the adjacent buildings that lack a sufficient gap from one another may experience a severe structural damage as a result of structural pounding. The effects of structural pounding specially gained more attention after the historic earthquakes of Mexico City (1985) and Loma Prieta (1989) where, a significant number of buildings were damaged due to pounding. In this paper, the analytical models that are reported in the literature to simulate the pounding forces were reviewed. These include linear elastic, linear viscoelastic, modified linear viscoelastic, Hertz non-linear elastic, Hertz-damp non-linear viscoelastic, and non-linear viscoelastic models. The accuracy of these methods has been examined and compared in this paper. Additionally, current strategies for mitigating the pounding effects in adjacent building structures are reviewed. The last component of this paper includes a case study wherein the pounding effects are mitigated via improving the effective lateral stiffness and/or effective damping ratio in the building structure of interest. Results of the case study indicate that the application of supplemental energy dissipation devices is effective in the mitigation of pounding effects in those buildings that lack any seismic gap with their neighboring structures.