Expected extreme value of pounding force between two adjacent buildings

Seismic pounding between adjacent buildings with inadequate separation and different dynamic characteristics can cause severe damage to the colliding buildings. Efficient estimation of the maximum pounding force is required to control the extent of damage in adjacent structures or develop an appropriate mitigation method. In this paper, an analytical approach on the basis of statistical relations is presented for approximate computation of extreme value of pounding force between two adjacent structures with equal or unequal heights subjected to stationary and non-stationary excitations. The nonlinearity of adjacent structures is considered using Bouc-Wen model of hysteresis and the pounding effect is simulated by applying the nonlinear viscoelastic model. It is shown that the proposed approach can significantly save computational costs by obviating the need for performing dynamic analysis. To assess the reliability and accuracy of the proposed approach, the results are compared with those obtained from nonlinear dynamic analysis.