ABSTRACT
Residential buildings in metropolitan cities which are located in seismically active regions are often built close to each other due to the economics of the land use or architectural reasons. Existing spacing between buildings may become not enough to avoid pounding if either historic restoration or seismic rehabilitation for existing fixed base buildings is done with the use of base isolation systems. Thus there is a need to study the effect of base isolation on pounding of buildings as well as of pounding on these base isolated buildings. The probability distribution of required separation distance of adjacent buildings to avoid seismic pounding were examined by Lin & Weng (2001), Stavroulakis & Abdalla (1991) and Maison & Kasai (1992). Zhang & Xu (2000) studied the response of two adjacent shear buildings connected to each other at each floor level by visco-elastic dampers represented byVoigt’s model. Although the study on earthquake-induced structural pounding has been recently much advanced, the above review indicates that very few studies are reported on the behaviour of base-isolated buildings during impact. Pounding between closely-spaced buildings having different dynamic properties was studied by Chau & Wei (2001), Uz & Hadi (2009), Hadi & Uz (2009), Jankowski et al. (1998) and Jankowski (2008). The aim of the present study is to conduct a detailed investigation on pounding-involved response of inelastic two base isolated buildings of unequal heights with using non linear visco-elastic model of collisions.
