Predicting the seismic collapse capacity of adjacent structures prone to pounding

In crowded cities, many structures are often constructed in a very close vicinity; therefore, during severe earthquakes, pounding phenomenon occurs due to out-of-phase vibrations of adjacent structures. In this study, pounding of adjacent structures is investigated up to the occurrence of total collapse. The novelty of this study is performing incremental dynamic analyses to compute the seismic collapse capacities of both pounding structures in one model and removal of the collapsed structure during analysis, and proposing modification factors for modifying median collapse capacity of single structures to consider the effect of pounding, which cannot be considered before the design process. The results indicate that pounding may significantly affect median collapse capacities of structures compared with those obtained by neglecting the pounding phenomenon. Therefore, different modification factors are required according to structural characteristics. It is noteworthy that the results of this study were obtained using simplifying assumptions and should not be generalized.