Developing a Seismic Demand Hazard Curve for Seismic Pounding Risk Assessment of Adjacent Buildings

Abstract

This paper proposes a novel seismic demand hazard model conditional on the separation distance between two adjacent buildings to fully explore the possibility of seismic pounding occurrence between buildings during their design life. The model uses an exponential function with two model parameters estimated through a two-point approach to yield an explicit expression for deriving a Seismic Demand Hazard Curve (SDHC) for adjacent buildings. The resulting SDHC provides a basis for seismic pounding risk assessment of adjacent buildings with a specific separation distance and a design tool for the risk-targeted separation distance between buildings. To verify the model, this paper compares the SDHCs derived for six pairs of adjacent buildings having different heights and natural period combinations with corresponding numerical simulation results. The results show that the SDHCs derived from the model, within the engineering interest range, closely agree with numerical simulation results.