A substructure formulation for the earthquake-induced nonlinear structural pounding problem

Earthquake-induced pounding is one of the major reasons for structural failure in earthquake prone cities. An accurate description of the pounding phenomenon of two buildings requires the consideration of systems with a large number of degrees of freedom including adequate contact impact formulations. In this paper, firstly, a node to surface formulation for the realization of state-of-the-art pounding models for structural beam elements is presented. Secondly, a hierarchical substructure technique is introduced, which is adapted to the structural pounding problem. The numerical accuracy and efficiency of the method, especially for the contact forces, are verified on an academic example, applying four different impact elements. Error estimations are carried out and compared with the classical modal truncation method. It is demonstrated that the hierarchical substructure method is indeed able to significantly speed up the numeric integration procedure by preserving a required level of accuracy.