Effect of passive coupling on seismic interaction optimization of adjacent structures

Abstract During the past few years, several studies have been conducted in various fields of civil engineering in order to design structures that can withstand the forces and deformations that might occur during seismic events. However, more recently, building adjacent structures close to each other and more resistant to earthquakes, provided with coupling systems, has been an issue of major concern. The effects of some parameters, such as the characteristics of adjacent structures and those of the coupling system, on the choice of the separation distance, were investigated using a program that was developed using MATLAB. This article aims to present a study that is intended to determine the parameters characterizing the coupling system. Moreover, the influence of rigidity of the structure was also examined. For this, three examples were investigated: a flexible structure, a rigid structure, and a very rigid structure. The results obtained from the numerical study made it possible to show that knowing the characteristics, number, and arrangements of the coupling systems can be used to find the minimum separation distance between two adjacent buildings.