Probabilistic analysis of structural pounding considering soil-structure interaction

During strong ground motions, adjacent structures with insufficient separation distances collide with each other causing considerable architectural and structural damage or collapse of the whole structure. Generally, existing design procedures for determining the separation distance between adjacent buildings subjected to structural pounding are based on approximations of the buildings' peak relative displacement. These procedures are based on unknown safety levels. This paper attempts to evaluate the influence of foundation flexibility on the structural seismic response by considering the variability in the system and uncertainties in the ground motion characteristics through comprehensive numerical simulations. Actually, the aim of this study is to evaluate the influence of foundation flexibility on probabilistic evaluation of structural pounding. A Hertz-damp pounding force model has been considered in order to effectively capture impact forces during collisions. In total, 5.25 million time-history analyses were performed over the adopted models using an ensemble of 25 ground motions as seismic input within OpenSees software. The results of the study indicate that the soil-structure interaction significantly influences the poundinginvolved responses of adjacent structures during earthquakes and generally increases the pounding probability.